Mutual (In)Comprehensions : France and Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century [1 ed.] 9781443850803, 9781443847773

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Mutual (In)Comprehensions

Mutual (In)Comprehensions: France and Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century

Edited by

Rosemary Mitchell

Mutual (In)Comprehensions: France and Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century, Edited by Rosemary Mitchell This book first published 2013 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 © 2013 by Rosemary Mitchell 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): 1-4438-4777-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4777-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Images ........................................................................................... viii Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Rosemary Mitchell, with Di Drummond and Nathan Uglow Part I: Through the Looking Glass: Reflections on/of the National “Other” Chapter One ............................................................................................... 28 Inventing rather than Copying? Gustave Doré’s Pilgrimage to London Françoise Baillet Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 41 The “Le Play Movement” and the Construction of England’s Educational Reputation Juliette Pochat Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 55 British Railwaymen in France: The (In)Comprehensions of British Railway Builders on France’s Early Lines Di Drummond Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 72 Continuity in the Land: The French Peasant in English Eyes Karen Sayer Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 90 Pierre Loti Lies at the Bottom of Joseph Conrad’s Sea of Memories Marialuisa Bignami

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Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 104 “Why All The Little Men in France [are] Soldiers and All The Big Men Postillions”: Dickens’s Vision of France and the French in Pictures from Italy (1846) Nathalie Vanfasse Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 122 Family Values versus the Value of Family: Carlyle’s Historical Writing of the 1850s Nathan Uglow Part II: Association – Comparison, Conciliation, Collaboration Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 150 Faith and the French: Anglo-Catholicism in the Anglo-French Historical Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge Rosemary Mitchell Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 179 Jules Verne and 1857: From French Criticism of British Colonialism to a Franco-British Reconciliation Arkiya Touadi Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 192 Dabs on the Canvas/Words on the Page: The Convergence of Paul Cézanne's Painting and Ernest Hemingway's Writing Claire Huguet Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 211 Hugo and Dickens: A View of the Changing Conceptions of the Body and Punishment in France and England, c. 1789-1859 Zineb Bouizem Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 233 French views of Victorian Architecture in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: César Daly’s and Napoléon Didron’s Architectural Criticism Odile Boucher-Rivalain

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Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 245 Interactions between the French and the British Geographical Societies at the beginning of the 1870s Isabelle Avila Contributors ............................................................................................. 266 Index ........................................................................................................ 271

LIST OF IMAGES

2.1 P.D. Philippoteaux, cover illustration for Paschal Grousset, La Vie de Collège en Angleterre (1884). 2.2 Illustration to Hippolyte Taine, Notes sur l’Angleterre (1872). 2.3 Front cover to Edmond Demolins, A Quoi Tient la Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons? (1898). 2.4 Edward Bradley [Cuthbert Bede], titlepage to The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1853). 2.5 P.D. Philippoteaux, illustrations to Paschal Grousset, La 2.6 La Vie de Collège en Angleterre (1884). All images reproduced by the author of chapter two (Juliette Pochat) from works in her own collection.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is a collection of the papers delivered at the “Mutual (In)Comprehensions: France and Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century”, a colloquium held at Trinity and All Saints College (now Leeds Trinity University), in West Yorkshire, in May 2008. This was the second in a series of joint colloquia, hosted alternately by the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies and CICC (Civilisations et Identités Culturelles Comparées des Societiés Européennes et Occidentales), at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, Paris. I am therefore grateful to everyone who participated in this colloquium, and everyone who supported it, especially the humanities academic staff, the postgraduate students, and the support staff of both universities. To Martin Hewitt, first Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, and Odile Boucher-Rivalain, who took the lead in establishing and sustaining this link, a particular debt is owed. Long may this academic collaboration and exchange last. The long-suffering contributors to this volume have waited many years for its publication: I am very grateful to them. Thanks are due also to the editorial staff of Cambridge Scholars Publishing, especially Carol Koulikourdi, Amanda Millar, and Emily Surrey, for their assistance and support in preparing this volume, and their exemplary patience in dealing with such a delinquent editor. I am also very grateful to Liz Fawcett for her swift and sterling work in preparing the index.

INTRODUCTION ROSEMARY MITCHELL, WITH DI DRUMMOND AND NATHAN UGLOW

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France.1

France and Britain have had a long and ambiguous relationship. Such terms as “the auld alliance” (the understanding between France and Scotland of their mutual enmity towards England) and the “entente cordiale” (the more recent tradition of diplomatic rapprochement between Britain and her nearest Continental neighbour) illustrate how the relationship between the rulers and governments of London and Paris has varied over the course of centuries.2 Underpinning political interactions has been economic trade and rivalry, and cultural antagonism, exchange, and emulation. Dickens’s quotation in the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), an historical novel opening on the eve of the French Revolution, by its title invites the reader to compare and contrast the two national capitals—and to find a great resemblance, and a crucial dissimilarity: there is the sense of a mirror image which reveals an unexpected minor difference, an unsettling flaw in the glass. The overtly Francophobic Dickens will, of course, swiftly move on to demonstrate (at least to his own satisfaction) that the catastrophic events of the Revolution show the vast difference of character between the two nations. Dickens’s attempt to establish a complete contrast between France and Britain seems like a more serious version of James Gillray’s ironic cartoon of 1789, British Slavery: here a scrawny French man eats his meagre supper while extolling his new-found liberty, while an obese Englishman dines sumptuously, deploring the oppressive British government and its taxation policy. This constant process of comparison and contrast, of regarding and reflecting on the “other” nation as apart from, and yet a part of one’s own, is the theme of this collection of essays.

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A substantial scholarship on the relations between France and Britain in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-centuries is now developing. Jeremy Black’s Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (1989) offers a survey of political interactions, which stresses the profound cultural differences between the two nations (such as their differing religious identities and artistic trends), and their conflicts over their expanding empires.3 Linda Colley and Gerald Newman have both identified Francophobia as a key element in national selfdefinition in the period,4 but equally Robin Eagles has stressed elite enthusiasm for the sister nation in his 2000 publication, Francophilia in English Society, 1748-1815.5 Ambiguous responses to the French Revolution are equally apparent: historians and literary critics have both explored the liberal and Romantic responses to the French Revolution, as well as the subsequent disillusionment which followed, with war and intense national hostility to Napoleon Bonaparte.6 Nevertheless, Stuart Semmel’s 2003 study of Napoleon and the British revealed that the selfmade French emperor unsettled British national certainties, provoking reflections on the British constitution and eventually soliciting sympathy as a liberal icon in his years of imprisonment after the restoration of the French monarchy in 1814.7 The same experience of combined admiration for, and antagonism towards, the other nation was apparent in French society. Frances Acomb long since described the Anglophobia prevalent in pre-Revolutionary France among conservative monarchists, radical republicans, and liberal physiocrats, all of them equally deploring the constitutional character of British monarchical government.8 Josephine Grieder explores an equally powerful enthusiasm for all things English in pre-Revolutionary France, focusing on cultural texts such as travel-writing and novels.9 Coverage of Franco-British relations in the later nineteenth century has been more episodic, making the picture even less straightforward. Beginning with the French doyen of British economic history, François Crouzet, there has been much interest in the comparative fortunes of the two nations and their economic interactions. The question of how and why Britain emerged as the predominant industrial power, eclipsing her Continental rival, has often been discussed, and indeed the differing “pathways” have been interpreted as divergent but equally valid.10 Naturally, the 1860 Anglo-French commercial treaty, a free trade agreement between the two nations, garnered much scholarly attention in the 1970s.11 More recently, J.V.C. Nye—taking the long view of AngloFrench trade—has suggested that some of the orthodoxies of economic history need revision: Great Britain, he argues, was not really the free

Rosemary Mitchell, with Di Drummond and Nathan Uglow

trade nation of our imagination, nor was its Continental rival “Fortress France”.12 The history of the diplomatic relations of the two nations in the post-Napoleonic period—and in particular the growth of the entente cordiale—has been a related area of interest: David Brown’s work, for instance, has recently demonstrated that the amicable agreement reached in the 1840s by Peel’s foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, was sustained more successfully throughout the Palmerstonian era than was previously believed.13 Historians of political science have been exploring the extent to which French and British politicians and political writers contemplated the constitutional arrangements of the rival nation in order to define or develop their own.14 Cultural and intellectual interactions, however, have really dominated recent scholarship on Franco-British relations in the nineteenth century, although the prevailing tendency has been to undertake case-studies of specific interactions.15 Works such as Edward Morris’s magisterial survey, French Art in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2005), which attempts (not entirely successfully) to offer an overview of at least one aspect of the rich and complex pattern of cultural exchange across the century, are few and far between.16 It is interesting to note an increasing awareness of competitive nationalism at work in cultural interactions: Holger Hoock’s article on the British Museum’s acquisitions in the first half of the nineteenth century suggests a far more state-driven, competitive policy in operation— something similar to the strategies of French cultural institutions— rather than the ad hoc reliance on donations which earlier commentators postulated.17 Historians considering cultural organisations and events in the long nineteenth century—such as the expositions and world fairs which included the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908, which celebrated the entente cordiale of 1904—have seen them as crucial to the development of competitive national identities, as well as occasions of “cultural transfer”.18 Increasingly, there is a sense of the need for sophisticated analytical tools to understand how France and Britain related to each other, and developed and refined national identities, in a global context. Most recently, nuanced studies of Franco-British cultural relations have appeared in the area of Victorian Studies under the umbrella of “Victorian internationalisms” and the developing understanding of Victorian “geopolitics” as theorised by Lauren M.E. Goodlad.19 Goodlad’s argument—that Victorian literature needs to be seen as expressive of and embedded in multiple global contexts—is one that validates this current publication.20

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This collection of essays thus contributes to a growing and increasingly sophisticated area of scholarship which explores Franco-British interactions and exchanges, and in particular the construction of national identities through the processes of mutual observation, emulation, vilification, and co-operation. All the essays in the collection were initially delivered as papers at the Mutual (In)Comprehensions colloquium, held at Leeds Trinity and All Saints’ College (now Leeds Trinity University), West Yorkshire, in May 2008. This was the second in a series of joint colloquia, hosted alternately by the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, based in Leeds Trinity, and the CICC (Civilisations et Identités Culturelles Comparées des Societiés Européennes et Occidentales), based at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, Paris. The first colloquium, hosted at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, and with the title “Regards des AngloSaxons sur la France au Cours du Long XIXe Siècle” had already explored British and American responses to nineteenth-century France—its politics, its economy, its culture—and how these perceptions shaped Anglo-Saxon ideas and activities.21 At the 2008 colloquium, the aim was to consider French perceptions of Britain, too, and to establish a sense of the highly dialogic and interactive nature of Franco-British relations. The result was a rich and at times surprising aperçu, a discerning glance—or rather a series of such insights—into the collaborations, co-operations, competitions, comprehensions, and misunderstandings of two rival yet neighbourly nations. It is no surprise to find that nineteenth-century French and British people continued to define themselves through perceptions and appropriations of the national other, as had their eighteenth-century predecessors. While French commentators reflected on the example of British political stability, educational success, technological expertise, and industrial prosperity, British observers contemplated the vibrant and sophisticated cultural traditions and movements of France, and were envious of the social poise and elegant fashions of the rival nation. While a Victorian Protestant Englishman of middle-class status might well deplore the Catholicism of some of the French bourgeoisie and the secular scepticism of others, a Frenchman might equally find his British counterpart materialistic, philistine, and Puritanical. But—as the following essays show—the pattern of mutual perception and interaction was always more complex: each people defined themselves as they defined the other, but each was open to unexpected encounters and experiences. A French architectural writer finds the British admirably informed about medieval arts and architecture; a British engineer finds the French government sensible and efficient. A British writer utilises French

Rosemary Mitchell, with Di Drummond and Nathan Uglow

history as a useful vehicle by which to challenge Victorian domestic ideology, while a French novelist moves from a critique of British imperialism in India to a sense of France and Britain as united western powers against the Indian “other”. That last development is significant: in the face of empire and globalisation, both nations had to co-operate as well as compete, to recognise their common interests as well as their differing developments. While studies of artistic and literary connections and influences predominate here, this collection is unique in the breadth of its range, which includes topics as diverse as movements for educational reform, railway construction, British perceptions of French early modern religious history, French critiques of British architecture, and the exchanges of geographical societies in both countries. It demonstrates the significance of Franco-British interactions over the long nineteenth century, and shows that—as ever—British and French life and culture can only be fully understood within a broader and indeed global framework. National identity is defined as much by other nations as the home country. No man is an island, and no island is really an island either. The collection opens with a section entitled “Through the Looking Glass: Reflections on/of the National ‘Other’”. Chapters in this section explore the perceptions of the British by the French, and of the French by the British, revealing that that each finds the experience of observing somewhat like that of Alice contemplating herself in the looking glass: everything is similar, yet reversed, and the experience often becomes more than a matter of observation. It becomes immersive, surprising, revealing, and self-defining—nor does the watcher go unwatched: the regards, to play on the multiple French and English nuances of the word, become mutual. Françoise Baillet’s chapter on Gustave Doré’s (1832-1883) famous collaboration with Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872), begins an exploration of Franco-British perceptions of the national other. This nineteenthcentury French Dante records his impressions of his tourist travels in Victorian London, although notably with the omission of purgatory: we have the hellish places of underworld London and the plight of the urban poor who struggle to survive in them, contrasted with the paradise of pleasure enjoyed by the social elite. Baillet demonstrates how the dramatic chiaroscuro and Michelangelosque allusions of the scenes of deprivation contrast with the light, rococo lines used by the artist to depict the aristocratic arcadias. Doré’s images are dramatised, stylised and fantastical, influenced by his illustrations for such visionary works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s

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Paradise Lost. However, Baillet argues, they are also works of social realism, based on his immersive experience of London life, a passionate empathy with the poor, and an interest in social documentation similar to that of British contemporaries such as Henry Mayhew and William Powell Frith. Here she identifies how the differing “pathways” of British and French industrial development nevertheless cross common ground in the rising concern for, and almost anthropological recording of, the urban working classes: Paul Gavarni and Emile Zola are similarly sociallyconcerned Frenchmen—and it is notable that Gavarni’s social conscience, like Doré’s, was particularly inspired by a visit to London. But we have not only the French envisaging the British, but also the British imaging the French in Baillet’s chapter. Doré’s visions of London, mediated through the representational codes of both contemporary Romanticism and realism, were in turn interpreted by their British audience, who found them alarmingly foreign, too emphatically French. As Baillet argues, Doré’s artistic training in France might explain some of the difficulty British critics experienced in appreciating his work—and even more the preferred British aesthetic of a down-to-earth naturalism. But a fuller explanation seems to lie in the disjuncture between Doré’s images and Jerrold’s project of social documentation, indeed social prescription: a means of not only recording the vibrant Victorian city, perhaps, but also of organising it into comforting categories which minimised the threat of social mobility and transformation. Baillet suggests that, ultimately, the problem with Doré’s images was not their exaggeration and eccentricity, their lack of naturalism, as British commentators suggested, but the acuity of his social vision and the authenticity of his response to the plight of the London poor. Dramatic and stylised as his images are, they revealed the social reality of a class gap, and hinted (to the anxious British viewer) of a coming apocalyptic moment, a possible revolution. In a sort of reversed visual reprise of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, we have—not a British author narrating a historical tale of revolutionary Paris—but a French artist setting the scene for a future history of revolutionary London. Doré’s famous futuristic image in A Pilgrimage, based on a comment by T.B. Macaulay and showing a New Zealander of a coming age contemplating the ruins of London, must have fed British subconscious fears of catastrophic upheaval and decline. While Doré’s perspective on life in the British capital was a decidedly critical one, Juliette Pochat finds evidence of French admiration for the British public education system in her chapter, which deals with the nineteenth-century political reformer, Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882), and

Rosemary Mitchell, with Di Drummond and Nathan Uglow

his influence. Pochat argues that Le Play and his contemporaries and disciples constructed a persuasive, but fundamentally flawed, myth about the English education system. This myth was connected to French envy of the British political system. British public schools were seen as the foundation of a society characterised by political stability and hierarchical social order: a contrast to upheavals and class conflict which, some French commentators held, were the particular curse of their own country. Studiously ignoring such developments in British education as the introduction of uniform elementary education in 1870, they focused on the British public school. In addition to praising their familial atmosphere and idyllic rural surroundings, French writers celebrated the “gentlemanly” values and physical education promoted in these establishments (it is no surprise to find Pierre de Coubertin among French admirers of the British public school). While J.A. Mangan has indeed demonstrated the centrality of physical education in selected later-nineteenth-century public schools,22 Pochat points out that Le Play made substantial assumptions about the fundamental similarity of all such establishments. She suggests that this flawed method derived from the approach which he used in his other sociological studies, in which he used the budgets of sample working-class families to extrapolate on the experience of larger groups. However, by comparison with the sources employed by Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), whose observations on British public schools were similarly celebratory, Le Play’s methodology was exemplary. Pochat points out that Taine frequently refers his readers to British novels, such as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown at Oxford (1862) and Edward Bradley’s The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1851-53)—both of which describe university, rather than school, life. But Pochat also points out that the French myth of the British public school did not go unchallenged: while it was received with complacency by British readers and reviewers, one M.J. Philipp—in a riposte to Edmond Demolins’s À Quoi Tient la Supériorité des AngloSaxons? (1898)—defended the French and their educational system, pointing out the lack of critical edge in the account of their AngloSaxon rivals. It seems that Philipp identified himself with Matthew Arnold, who—while being the offspring of Thomas Arnold and a former pupil at the archetypal English public school, Rugby—was a school inspector well-versed in and appreciative of the merits of Continental education systems. In fact, Arnold thought education too important a matter to be left to private concerns, and supported state education as a necessary condition of a civilised society; he also

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deplored British anti-intellectualism and emphasis on common sense practicality, an implicit acknowledgment that the cosmopolitan and intellectual culture of French and German schools was worthy of emulation.23 Similarly, Richard Holt has pointed out that—while French promoters of sport were often inspired and impressed by Anglo-Saxon sporting activities and practices—French sports organisations were more centralised and state-orientated than British ones, and often decidedly nationalistic, even chauvinistic, in their ethos.24 So both British complacency about the public school and French internationalism in sport had their limits. Di Drummond’s chapter also illustrates the complexities of FrancoBritish interactions. French admiration for British engineering led to the employment of British companies and personnel to build French railways: Drummond’s chapter explores the experience of British railwaymen working in nineteenth-century France, and representations of that experience in biographical accounts of their lives. She paints a complex and changing picture of the comprehension and representation of the “other”. As she shows, the opinions of the engineer Joseph Locke (18051860) and the contractor Thomas Brassey (1805-1870) are recorded in lives that owe much to Samuel Smiles’s seminal Lives of the Engineers, which created a distinctly modern hagiographical genre celebrating British technological and scientific knowledge and achievement, and the values of self-help and self-improvement. Drummond suggests a complex interaction between the recording of Locke’s and Brassey’s “real-life” experiences and opinions, and the tropes of the genre, which necessarily celebrated the modernity, technological superiority, and independent achievements of their British subjects. This necessitated, she argues, an incomprehension of the foreign “others” who worked on the French railways, both the French and other Continental nationals, who are seen to lack the dynamism of the British. The interdependency of the construction of the “other” is illustrated by the re-shaping of the image of the British navvy. When he is working in England, Drummond argues, the British navvy is perceived by his employers and other contemporaries as Irish or Scottish: in other words, other than Anglo-Saxon. Lacking the discipline and diligence of the Englishman, he is figured as child-like, prone to drunkenness and improvident (not to mention, often Catholic). However, in the view of Locke and Brassey and the writings of their biographers, Drummond demonstrates, the British navvy moved from being the “other” to being “us”: by comparison with Continental workers, he was seen as resilient, well-fed, hardy, hard-working, and skilled in the use of technologically-advanced tools.

Rosemary Mitchell, with Di Drummond and Nathan Uglow

Thus, Drummond’s case-study aptly demonstrates both the complexity and the protean nature of the construction of the racial or ethnic other in nineteenth-century British culture. British men and women who encountered other nationalities and races both interpreted them through the existing lens of racial ideas and theories, and contributed to and reinforced such ideas—and so did their biographers, recording their lives and experiences. Similarly, the construction of a hierarchy of race in scientific and popular culture meant that a subject such as the British navvy could be seen both as “other” and “us”, depending on context—as a Celtic inferior to the natural born Englishman with his Anglo-Saxon virtues, but as a British/Englishman superior to the Continental races (with the possible exception of the Germans, the Teutonic cousins of the English people). There is a final twist in the tail, Drummond suggests, as experience could genuinely impact on and modify entrenched cultural prejudices: Locke and Brassey eventually came to appreciate both the organisation and sensible regulations of the French government, and the financial prudence and personal temperance of the Belgian workers on the railways. While British views of the British navvy could shift in a given context, therefore, so too could British viewers of Continental workers. The instability of constructions of national identities—and thus the borders and relations between them—is readily apparent. While Drummond’s chapter illustrates a British interpretation of the French navvy as lacking the dynamism and modern work ethic of his British counterpart which shifts towards a more positive reading, Sayer’s chapter suggests a similar attitude to the French peasant. She argues convincingly that British artists and authors imbibed the French cultural perception of the French peasant, which stressed the antiquity and continuity of French provincial rural life: a comforting contrast to the rapid change and deracination of British industrial cities. As early as the 1820s, Sayer argues (drawing on the work of Marcia Pointon), the Anglo-French circle of R.P. Bonington were exploring and depicting the French provinces. While in some respects and for some individuals, such as Parthenope, Lady Verney, French models of landownership produced brutalising conditions and grinding poverty which made the French peasantry hardly distinguishable from their beasts, other British observers were attracted by the traditions and stability of the French provinces, which—in the case of Normandy and Brittany—had the same Celtic appeal as the rural parts of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Sayer explores the travel-writing of Matilda Betham-Edwards (18361919) and the economic prose of Henry Higgs (1864-1940), stressing

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that the more sympathetic response to French “continuity in the land” become more pronounced by the 1890s, when British concerns about rural depopulation and the loss of traditional rural communities was growing (and social unrest in the cities was increasing). She also identifies how the Irish Question also led to interest in the French system of métayage, which could seem to offer a potential solution. Additionally, Sayer points out that the growth in folklore studies also fuelled a more positive attitude to the French myth of the peasant, so ably formulated in a visual form by the French artist, Jean François Millet.25 Sayer traces Millet’s influence in the work of such artists as Herbert La Thangue and George Clausen, and the Newlyn Colony. As she ably demonstrates, “the myth of French continuity in the land allowed British authors to explore their own fears about national disruption, loss and decay”.26 Like Drummond’s chapter, Sayer’s essay demonstrates once again the complex character of British readings of the French other, which, in this case, were shaped as much by French representations as immediate experience and were determined by British anxieties and concerns. Marialuisa Bignami’s chapter explores the influence of the works of the French marine novelist, Pierre Loti (1850-1923) on the Anglo-Polish author, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). This brings out an additional national dimension of Conrad, who—Bignami demonstrates—often thought creatively as much in French as English. While Conrad scholars such as Yves Hervouet have acknowledged the influence of French literature on Conrad, their main focus has tended to be on the impact of better known writers such as Flaubert, Maupassant, and Anatole France. Bignami argues that Loti is a far more significant influence than we have so far realised, and demonstrates how Conrad’s prose—by a comparison of passages in Loti’s Mariage de Loti (1880) and Conrad’s awkward first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), which is often interpreted as the textual version of Impressionism—is influenced by Loti’s populist, heavily adjectival style, the product of late Romanticism. Similarly, she suggests that Conrad’s later sea novels, which are characterised by increasingly spare yet evocative prose, owe much to Loti’s Matelot (1893), finding close parallels between the careers and, in particular, the deaths and burials at sea, of Jean in Matelot, and Jimmy in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. She also suggests that Loti’s Breton novels, Mon Frère Yves (1883) and Pècheur d’Islande (1886), are a crucial influence not only on Conrad’s own Breton story, “The Idiots”, but also the later novels. She continues by suggesting that, although Conrad resisted categorization as a novelist of the exotic—such was not the aim or central core of his fiction, which moved towards a psychological realism which anticipated the “stream of

Rosemary Mitchell, with Di Drummond and Nathan Uglow

consciousness” tendencies of modernism—nevertheless there are still traces of Loti’s romantic orientalism to be found in his fiction. Her chapter suggests that the impact of French fiction on British latenineteenth-century literature cannot be overestimated, and continues to deserve further study.27 It also suggests that our tendency to focus on the more celebrated French (and British) writers and artists has blinded us to the impact of less well-known works on the culture of the other nation. Nathalie Vanfasse’s chapter explores the responses of perhaps the best-known British Victorian novelist, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), to the French terrains and peoples whom he encountered as he and his family travelled south to Italy. In Pictures from Italy (1846), Dickens recorded his impressions of French life from the city of Paris to the South of France. Vanfasse finds Dickens’s travelogue essentially unoriginal, as it relied heavily on Murray’s Handbook: a classic example of how existing British representations of France and the French shape the work of even this most inventive of writers. Dickens’s abiding fear of Roman Catholicism made his account of French religious practices painfully jocular and lacking in any real insight, although Vanfasse also suggests that he was unable to resist the impulse to resort to traditional generic modes which he imagined would meet audience expectations. Accordingly, his representation of the pope’s palace in Avignon was no doubt driven by British religious prejudices, but equally by the author’s sense that the Gothic mode was what his readers would expect. Similarly, she suggests, an overblown dialogue attributed to a French inn-keeper is a traditional comic staple of the British travelogue, and the Corniche coast is portrayed with the common subversion of the picturesque mode found in Victorian travel literature by the 1850s: scenic by sail, the charming villages prove shoddy and dirty on closer inspection by road. Unlike Drummond’s railway engineers, experience did not—Vanfasse suggests—change Dickens’s view of the French, if we are to judge this text or indeed the evidence of his novels. But, she continues, the text may not be truly representative of Dickens’s own views as he became more experienced in Continental travel: she cites his correspondence with his landlord in Condette as evidence of a far more positive response to an individual Frenchman. Pictures from Italy may, therefore, not reflect Dickens’s prejudices so much as those he expected of his readers. It is salutary to recall, too, that caricature is fundamental to Dickens’s style, and as freely applied to the British as the French.

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The next two chapters deal with the narration of French early modern history by two very different British writers. The first is the complex, restlessly radical and yet reactionary Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) whose little-known historical essay on “The Guises” is the subject of Nathan Uglow’s chapter.28 Uglow demonstrates that this account of the sixteenthcentury French dynastic family’s fatal influence on the politics of the courts of Henri II and his unfortunate sons can be viewed as an important turning point in Carlyle’s historical writings. Arguing that Rodger L. Tarr’s argument that “The Guises” is simply a dumping ground for tangential historical research undertaken for his monumental History of Frederick II of Prussia is too circumscribed, Uglow suggests that the essay should be seen as announcing a new thematic focus on the family in the work of Carlyle. Uglow argues that Carlyle uses the essay to begin a campaign against the domestic ideology of the family and the separate spheres prevalent in mid-Victorian Britain, which he believed endangered the creation of a unified moral perspective in and on society. Scholars have long recognised the influence of German Romantic ideals and Idealist philosophies on Carlyle, but Uglow here suggests that French Enlightenment sentimentalism was fruitfully combined with Teutonic influences in Carlyle’s exploration of the relationship between the individual, the family, and society. For Carlyle, Uglow argues, “The Guises” was a necessary staging post in the development of the thematic structures which allowed him to understand the historical role of Frederick the Great as both a more successful reprise of his father, and a “hostel” for the tendencies of his age and society. In addition, the essay allowed Carlyle to understand his own relationship to his father, his appropriation and articulation of muted paternal ideals, and thus his own role in his own time and place. Rosemary Mitchell’s chapter, meanwhile, considers the Anglo-French historical novels of Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1901), who is so much better known for her domestic fictions such as The Daisy Chain and The Pillars of the House. Building on the work of Maria Poggi Johnson, Mitchell demonstrates that Yonge’s historical novels —like her domestic fictions—need to be taken very seriously as theological works, as they offer a complex and sustained historical justification of the Anglican via media embodied in both the Laudian High Church of the seventeenth century and the Victorian Oxford Movement (Tractarianism). In the first of these novels, The Chaplet of Pearls (1868), Yonge’s hero and heroine—Berenger and Eustacie—represent in their lives and their marriage that union of the best in the Catholic and the Reformed traditions which is, for Yonge, the Anglo-Catholic position. Separated by the Saint

Rosemary Mitchell, with Di Drummond and Nathan Uglow

Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, the two battle to find each other, encountering the extremes of fanatic political Catholicism and Calvinism, but supported and succoured by representatives of both churches whose faith is more compassionate and genuinely Christian. While sixteenth-century France, torn by the Wars of Religion, represents the undesirable extremes of Catholicism and Protestantism for Yonge, Mitchell argues, Elizabethan England is peacefully building an Anglican via media in which both Berenger and Eustacie can find rest. Meanwhile, in the second novel in the series—Stray Pearls (1881-83)—Yonge traces parallels between the High Church Anglicanism of Charles I’s court, and the best features of the reforming Catholic Church of seventeenth-century France, embodied by Bossuet, Vincent de Paul, and the Jansenists. For Yonge, French Gallicanism, which supported the idea of national and semi-autonomous branches of the Roman confession, offered a means of writing the Anglican Church back into the history of Western Christianity, as a branch of the universal church, rather than a schismatic sect. Mitchell argues that the final novel in the series, The Release (1896), further develops a rapprochement between the Anglican and the Roman Catholic churches, exploring as it does the impact of the secularising French Revolution, which brings elite French Catholics and English Protestants into contact and (sometimes) sympathetic understanding, united by a common fear of religious scepticism and political radicalism. This is emblematic of late-nineteenth-century Christian ecumenicalism in the face of advancing secularism: one end-of-century threat encouraged remembrance of another, similar moment of sympathetic alliance. This note of religious rapprochement acts as a bridge for the movement into the second section of the collection, which is entitled “Association—Comparison, Collaboration, Conciliation”. Here the case-studies show the impact of global contexts—of Victorian “geopolitics”—on Franco-British relations, and suggest a complex pattern of interactions which challenge simplistic analyses of either “national rivalry” or “foreign influences”. Arkiya Touadi discusses a French reaction to another British institution—its global empire—and similarly records a sophisticated response. Touadi examines French perspectives on British colonialism through a case-study of Jules Verne’s 1880 novel, La Maison à Vapeur, which narrates the events of the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Verne’s title alludes to an impressively modern train which transports the British characters in the novel through the Indian landscape. It is no surprise to find Verne apparently in admiration of British technological expertise (Drummond’s chapter

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has already demonstrated French appreciation of the neighbouring nation in this respect), but Touadi suggests that the novel begins as a critique of British colonial government in India. This is compared most unfavourably with the rule of their own nation by French characters—such as Maucler— who argue that the British, with such policies as Dalhousie’s Doctrine of Lapse (1848), have alienated the subjugated Indian peoples, who are naturally gentle and docile when well-managed. However, while Touadi argues that Verne allows his French characters to interpret the insurgency of 1857 as a justified response to harsh British rule, she also suggests that he increasingly brings them into alignment with the attitudes expressed by such British figures as Colonel Munro. The rebellion may be justified for Verne, but it releases the sort of Indian savagery which he believes all Westerners must unite to repress. Touadi argues that it is on the grounds of gender ideology that the two European nations come into alliance: she contrasts the depiction of the warlike Rani of Jhansi with that of la Flamme Errante, a wandering woman, who eventually is revealed to be the long-lost wife of Munro. Driven out of her senses by her experiences at Cawnpore, she embodies the domestic and submissive womanhood which the Amazonian Rani subverts. The two women correspond to Indian gender types—the sati, the self-sacrificing widow, and the warrior queen, the virangana: as such, they stand for India itself and the positive and negative characteristics of its people in Verne’s novel. The Rani has been slain in battle at the time of the 1857 rebellion by Colonel Munro himself: Touadi argues that this represents the suppression of Indian violence which Verne approves. In the person of la Flamme Errante, the lost Lady Munro, the better, the governable side of India subject to western civilization, survives: the attempt by Nana Sahib to slaughter her at Cawnpore has failed, and he himself perishes at the close of the novel. In his death, Touadi suggests, Verne negotiates an entente cordiale between Britain and France which might express, not so just a common platform of Western colonial opposition to indigenous insurrection, but a new alliance against the rising power of Germany—an “other” closer to home. Meanwhile, Claire Huguet’s chapter on the early-twentieth-century American writer, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), and the French painter, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), offers a sophisticated analysis of the artist’s influence on the writer. While earlier accounts of the important impact of Paris on Hemingway have failed to convince—as Hemingway seemed uninterested in French contemporary authors, and moreover under the influence of American writers resident in the French capital—Huguet considers instead the role of the paintings of a prominent and innovative

Rosemary Mitchell, with Di Drummond and Nathan Uglow

French artist. While other scholars have explored Cézanne’s impact on the painter, Huguet offers a more in-depth and analytical perspective. She identifies a range of techniques which she believes that Hemingway developed from his passion for the works of Cézanne, viewed during his period in Paris. This included the use of blank areas in canvas and text, meaningful and deliberate omissions which pare down the image and the text to their essentials and force the audience to create visual and narrative connections themselves. Similarly, she argues, both painter and author produce complicated foregrounds and simplified, even stylised backdrops, and shaded and coloured their images and texts. She analyses the motifs of mountain, river, and road which occur in the works of both painter and writer, but also shows how these indicate the point of divergence: Hemingway simplified his text and utilised landscape motifs as a sort of symbolic shorthand, but he never moved on to the textual equivalent (is there one?) of Cézanne’s abstract art. Huguet’s convincing analysis offers not only an example of converging (and diverging) techniques in the works of French and Anglophone artists, but also is a model for interdisciplinary scholarship: national and generic interactions are both explored in her compelling analysis. Zineb Bouizem’s interesting chapter on Victor Hugo’s Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné (1829) and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) offers a similarly provocative comparative study: she shows how closely the views of these two eminent writers align on the topic of crime and punishment.29 She begins with an exploration of their opposition to the death penalty, showing how they campaign through their writing for its abolition, offering similar reasons for this reform: a sense that the spectacle of execution dehumanises both the victim and the audience, and an anxiety that the innocent might be irreparably punished for a crime which is not theirs. While Hugo presents us with the inner experience of the condemned man awaiting death, Bouizem suggests, Dickens portrays the double injustice of Sydney Carton’s execution during the French Revolution: Carton suffers in the place of Charles Darnay, who is himself innocent of the crime with which he is charged. As Bouizem demonstrates, both authors depict vividly and compellingly the transformation of the viewing public into inhuman participants in what equates to a ritualistic festival—into beasts, vampires, drinkers of human blood. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Bouizem perceptively points out that the transformation of attitudes to capital punishment in the nineteenth century can be linked to concepts of the body: in the

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writings of both the authors on whom she focuses can be found the common theme of the brutal dismemberment of the body as the characteristic feature of barbaric forms of punishment, which savour more of revenge than justice. However, as she demonstrates, the movement towards the use of prison rather than capital punishment (imprisoning the body rather than rending it apart) raised difficult questions about the nature of the criminal: are they are savages and madmen, beyond redemption, or victims of their environment, who can be rehabilitated? Bouizem suggests that Hugo, and even more clearly Dickens, remained ambivalent about the nature of the criminal—but that both held that, whether or not the criminal could be rehabilitated, prison was not the environment which would facilitate this transformation. In particular, they both deplored the new idea of solitary confinement as a means of allowing the prisoner to reflect and repent: in fact, these conditions could lead to madness. Dickens’s portrayal of Doctor Manette in A Tale of Two Cities is, in Bouizem’s opinion, a particularly telling exemplar of the dangers of such solitary confinement. Bouizem concludes with the reflection that the symmetry of opinion between French and British author is almost complete: both reflect the complexity of debates, and both conclude that society needs to acknowledge its responsibility for the creation of criminality. For this reason, Hugo’s condemned man is an almost anonymous Everyman. The fact that the two authors have such similar views is striking, given the lack of known exchange between the two on these issues, and reflects the international character of the debates on crime and punishment in the nineteenth century. Internationalism is also apparent in Odile Boucher-Rivalain’s exploration of French architects’ views of British architecture in the early Victorian period, when both countries were experiencing the Gothic revival in architecture and simultaneously facing demands for new sorts of architectural forms designed to meet new building requirements. BoucherRivalain argues that César Daly (1811-1894), the founder and editor of the influential Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publics, saw architecture as essentially a union of art and science, past and present; but he also promoted international collaboration as well as these other partnerships. His journal was distributed and read in Britain, and aimed to promote international understanding and architectural achievement. Despite his own collaborations with the antiquary Thomas Wright and the architect A.W.N. Pugin, the Revue was sadly short of articles by British architects and writers—but some, including Charles Barry, for instance, did contribute material. Daly himself greatly admired both the antiquity and the modernity of England and its architecture, seeing it as a model for

Rosemary Mitchell, with Di Drummond and Nathan Uglow

industrial development at the service of art. He used the modernity and originality of British architecture, as he saw it, as a medium to critique French architectural practice and in particular its tendency to copy historical styles. Napoléon Didron (1806-1867), a friend of the famous French Gothic architect, Viollet-le-Duc, was perhaps more attached to the Gothic Revival than Daly, but shared Daly’s vision of a new style of architecture informed by tradition and an admiration for British developments. In his journal, Annales Archéologiques, he promoted the conservation of historic buildings, winning the support of Victor Hugo—and he found in the British archaeological movements of the 1840s a model for his own country.30 Visiting the Great Exhibition in 1851, he acknowledged the British achievement in researching, understanding, and reviving medieval arts and styles, while also celebrating the role of his own journal in this process. While architectural historical scholarship, considering Anglo-French cultural relations at the time of the Gothic Revival, has identified national competitiveness and tension between the two countries,31 BoucherRivalain here suggests the degree of co-operation and mutual admiration existed too, part of a spirit of international intellectual and scientific co-operation increasingly apparent in nineteenth-century Europe. Isabelle Avila’s chapter on interactions between the French and British geographical societies at the beginning of the 1870s is a similarly sophisticated analysis of Franco-British relations, which fittingly concludes the collection. In a novel contribution to the debate on geography and empire, Avila focuses on the international rather than the imperial dimensions of her subject: the relationship between the two western nations at work in the imperial arena, rather than the interaction between a western nation and the imperial “other”. Her chapter explores the tension between the generation of geographical knowledge as a universalist, international scientific concern, and its production for national interests. Accordingly, the two societies exchanged information and shared maps and celebrated the achievement of explorers from the other country, but also exhibited underlying patriotic commitments, apparent in Avila’s subtle readings of their maps and cartographic practices. She argues that: there were therefore two levels on which these societies operated: an upper level which was scientific and internationalist in character, bypassing national boundaries, and a lower level which developed within national boundaries and which aimed at serving the interests of a specific nation. Was this a distinction between ideal and real geography? Geography could

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Introduction be seen as the study of the whole world without any preferences, but it was also the study of the world from one particular point of view which discovered knowledge related to one’s own interests. Geography and explorations were scientific endeavours which were both international (contributing to universal knowledge of the world) and national (producing knowledge that could be useful nationally): many articles presented in these journals belonged to both categories. For that reason, it is very difficult to distinguish purely scientific aims from nationalistic motivations, for they went hand in hand.32

Avila neatly identifies a problem for many nineteenth-century scholars and intellectuals—the tension between commitments to the scholarly and scientific community, and one’s own country, between being an internationalist or a patriot—which has been more fully explored in the recently-published collection, Anglo-French Attitudes, edited by Christophe Charle, Julien Vincent, and Jay Winter.33 In the wake of the FrancoPrussian war, Avila concludes, the French geographical society—despite being the first to be founded—lost ground in terms of prestige, allowing its British counterpart to emerge as the leading institution in the development of geographical knowledge. For Avila, this is reflected in the tendency of the French society to translate the British maps in its journal, a compliment which was not reciprocated by the British Geographical Society.

Bibliography Acombe, F. Anglophobia in France, 1763-1789: An Essay in the History of Constitutionalism and Nationalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1950. Aprile S., and Bensimon, F. La France et l’Angleterre au XIXe Siècle. Paris : Creaphis Editions, 2006. Bainbridge, S. Napoleon and English Romanticism. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1995. Bann, Stephen. “Paul Delaroche’s Early Work in the Context of English History”. Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 3 (2006): 341-369. Bensimon, F. Les Britanniques face a La Révolution Française de 1848. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2000. Black, Jeremy. Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Bordes, Philippe. “Jacques-Louis David’s Anglophilia on the Eve of the French Revolution”. Burlington Magazine 134, no. 1073 (August, 1992): 482-490.

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Boucher-Rivalain, Odile. “Attitudes to Gothic in French Architectural Writings of the 1840s”. Architectural History 41 (1998):145-52. —. and Hajdenko-Marshall, Catherine, eds. Regards des Anglo-Saxons sur la France au Cours du Long XIXe Siècle. Paris: L”Harmattan, 2008. Bradley, Simon. “The Englishness of the Gothic: Theories and Interpretations from William Gilpin to J.H. Parker”. Architectural History 45 (2002): 325-346. Brown, D. “Palmerston and Anglo-French Relations, 1846-1865”. Diplomacy and Statecraft 17, no. 4 (Dec., 2006): 675-692. Bullen, R. Palmerston, Guizot, and the Collapse of the Entente Cordiale. London : Athlone Press, 1974. Charle, Christophe, Vincent, Julien, and Winter, Jay, eds. Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Cole, S. R. “National Histories, International Genre: Thackeray, Balzac, and the Franco-British Bildungsroman ”. In L.M.E. Goodlad and Julia M. Wright, eds. Special Issue on “Victorian Internationalisms” . Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 48 (2007). At http://www.érudit.org/revue/ravon/v/n48. Colley, L. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. Connell, W. F. The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold. London: Kegan Paul, 1951. Crossley, C., and Small, I. eds. The French Revolution and British Culture. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1990. —. Studies in Anglo-French Cultural Relations: Imagining France. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Crouzet, F. Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Cubbitt, G. “The Political Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in Bourbon Restoration France”. Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (March, 2007): 73-95. Desaulniers, M. Carlyle and the Economics of Terror: A Study of Revisionary Gothicism in the French Revolution. Québec: McGillQueen’s Press, 1995. Desmarais, J. The “Beardsley Industry”: The Critical Reception in England and France, 1893-1914. London: Ashgate, 1998. Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1949.

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Dickinson, H. T. ed. Britain and the French Revolution, 1789-1815. London : Macmillan, 1989. Dunham, A. L. The Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce of 1860 and the Progress of the Industrial Revolution in France. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1971. Eagles, R. Francophilia in English Society, 1748-1815. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Embry, K. “Towards an Entente Cordiale: The Cultivation of Cosmopolitan Sympathies in Ouida’s Under Two Flags”. Studies in the Novel 42, no. 3 (Fall, 2010): 227-48. Gilmartin, K. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790-1832. Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 2007. Goodlad, L.M.E. “Cosmopolitanism’s Actually Existing Beyond: Towards a Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic”. Victorian Literature and Culture 38, no. 4 (September, 2010): 399-411. Grenby, M. O. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2001. Grieder, J. Anglomania in France, 1740-1789: Fact, Fiction and Political Discourse. Geneva and Paris: Librarie Droz, 1985. Hicks, G. “An Overlooked Entente: Lord Malmesbury, Anglo-French Relations, and the Conservatives’ Recognition of the Second Empire, 1852”. History 92, no. 306 (Apr., 2007): 187-206. Holt, R. “Contrasting Nationalisms: Sport, Militarism, and the Unitary State in Britain and France before 1914”. In Tribal Identities: Nationalism, Europe and Sport, ed. J.A. Mangan, 39-45. London and Portland, Oregon: Frank Cass Publishers, 1996. Hoock, H. “The British State and the Anglo-French Wars over Antiquities, 1798-1858”. Historical Journal 50/1 (March, 2007): 49-72. Iliasu, A. A. “The Cobden-Chevalier Commercial Treaty of 1860”. Historical Journal 14, no. 1 (1971): 67-98. Jenning, J. R. “Conceptions of England and its Constitution in NineteenthCentury French Political Thought”, Historical Journal 29, no. 1 (1986) : 65-85. Kaiser, W. “Cultural Transfer of Free Trade at World Exhibitions, 18511862”. Journal of Modern History 77, no. 3 (September, 2005): 56390. —. “Vive La France! Vive la République? The Cultural Construction of French Identity at the World Exhibitions in Paris, 1855-1900”. National Identities 1, no. 3 (1999): 227-44. Kelly, G. Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790-1827. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1993.

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Kent, Julia. “Oscar Wilde’s ‘False Notes’: Dorian Gray and English Realism”. In L.M.E. Goodlad and Julia M. Wright, eds. Special Issue on “Victorian Internationalisms”. Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 48 (2007). At http://www.érudit.org/revue/ravon/v/n48. Lege, P. “La Représentation des Socialistes Français dans l’Oeuvre de John Stuart Mill”. In La France et l’Angleterre au XIXe Siècle, edited by S. Aprile and F. Bensimon, 105-122 . Paris: Creaphis Editions, 2006. Levine, P. The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896. Mangan, J.A. Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1981. —. The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal. London and Portland, Oregon: Frank Cass Publishers, 1995. Morris, E. French Art in Nineteenth-Century Britain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Nash, P. Culture and the State: Matthew Arnold and Continental Education. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. Newman, G. The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 17401830 . New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987. Nochlin, Linda. “The Image of the Working Woman”. In her Representing Women, 81-105. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Nye, J. V. C. War, Wine and Taxation: The Political Economy of AngloFrench Trade, 1689-1900. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007. O’Brien, P.K. and Keyder, C. Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780-1914: Two Paths to the Twentieth Century. London, Boston, and Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1978. Philp, M. ed. The French Revolution and British Popular Politics. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pitt, A. “A Changing Anglo-Saxon Myth: its Development and Function in French Political Thought, 1860-1914”. French History 14, no. 2 (2000): 150-175. Radcliffe, B. M. “The Origins of the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1860: A Reassessment”. In Great Britain and Her World, 1750-1914: Essays in Honour of W.O. Henderson, edited by B. M. Radcliffe, 12551. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975. Radford, A., and Reid, V., eds. Franco-British Cultural Exchanges, 18801940. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Rapple, B. “Matthew Arnold and Comparative Education”. British Journal of Educational Studies 37, no. 1 (February, 1989): 54-71. Rigney, A. The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Semmel, S. Napoleon and the British. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Stott, R. “Thomas Carlyle and the Crowd: Revolution, Geology, and the Convulsive ‘Nature’ of Time”. Journal of Victorian Culture 1, no. 1(1999): 1-24. Tambling, J. “Prison-Bound: Dickens and Foucault”. Essays in Criticism 36, no. 1(1986): 11-31. Varouxakis, G. Victorian Political Thought on France and the French. Basingstoke : Palgrave, 2002. Wright, Beth S. “‘A Better Way to read Great Works’: Lithographs by Delacroix, Roqueplan, Boulanger, and the Déveria Brothers in Gaugain’s Suite of Scott Subjects, 1829-1830”. Word and Image 26, no. 4 (2010): 337-363.

Notes 1

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1949), 1. 2 This opening sentence immediately illustrates one of the difficulties posed by the study of relations between France and Britain: the fact that the creation of the United Kingdom is a relatively recent event in the history of this relationship, and that for many preceding (and even successive) centuries, French interactions with England are not necessarily representative of their interactions with the other three constituent parts of the British Isles. Franco-British and Anglo-French are terms used rather loosely and interchangeably in the literature. For the sake of clarity, we have used Franco-British in this introduction (as all the chapters in this book relate to a period when the English government claimed to govern the entire British Isles); however, contributors to the collection have been permitted to use whichever term appears appropriate to them in the context of their work. 3 Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1989). 4 G. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987); L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). 5 R. Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 1748-1815 (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 6 The literature dealing with British reactions to, and interpretations of, the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath is very substantial. Collections of essays

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23

dealing with political responses include H.T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the French Revolution, 1789-1815 (London : Macmillan, 1989) and M. Philp, ed., The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991). Literary intepretations now tend towards more comprehensive consideration of conservative rather than radical reactions: recent examples include C Crossley and I. Small, eds., The French Revolution and British Culture (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1990), G. Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790-1827 (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1993), M. O. Grenby, The AntiJacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2001), S. Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1995), and K. Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 2007). 7 S. Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 8 F. Acombe, Anglophobia in France, 1763-1789: An Essay in the History of Constitutionalism and Nationalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1950). 9 J. Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740-1789: Fact, Fiction and Political Discourse (Geneva and Paris: Librarie Droz, 1985). Grieder argues that Anglomania ends with the arrival of the French Revolution, while Acomb dates the emergence of a negative view of Britain to the Seven Years War and the 1778 intervention of France in the American Wars of Independence. Individual casestudies such as Philippe Bordes, “Jacques-Louis David’s Anglophilia on the Eve of the French Revolution”, Burlington Magazine 134, no. 1073 (August, 1992): 482490, suggests a more complicated and variegated picture of this shift in public attitude. 10 F. Crouzet, Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); P. K. O’Brien and C. Keyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780-1914: Two Paths to the Twentieth Century (London, Boston, and Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1978) 11 A.L. Dunham, The Anglo-French Treaty of Commerce of 1860 and the Progress of the Industrial Revolution in France (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1971); A. A. Iliasu, “The Cobden-Chevalier Commercial Treaty of 1860”, Historical Journal 14, no. 1 (1971): 67-98; B. M. Radcliffe, “The Origins of the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1860: A Reassessment”, in Great Britain and Her World, 1750-1914: Essays in Honour of W.O. Henderson, ed. B. M. Radcliffe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 125-51. 12 J. V. C. Nye, War, Wine and Taxation: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689-1900 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007). 13 R. Bullen, Palmerston, Guizot, and the Collapse of the Entente Cordiale (London : Athlone Press, 1974); D. Brown, “Palmerston and Anglo-French Relations, 1846-1865”, Diplomacy and Statecraft 17, no. 4 (Dec., 2006): 675-692; G. Hicks, “An Overlooked Entente: Lord Malmesbury, Anglo-French Relations, and the Conservatives’ Recognition of the Second Empire, 1852”, History 92, no. 306 (Apr., 2007): 187-206. There has also been interest in the British reaction to

24

Introduction

the French Revolution of 1848, for instance, see F. Bensimon, Les Britanniques face à La Révolution Française de 1848 (Paris : L”Harmattan, 2000) and S. Aprile and F. Bensimon, La France et l’Angleterre au XIXe Siècle (Paris : Creaphis Editions, 2006), especially part one. 14 J. R. Jenning, “Conceptions of England and its Constitution in NineteenthCentury French Political Thought”, Historical Journal 29, no. 1 (1986) : 65-85 ; A. Pitt, “A Changing Anglo-Saxon Myth: its Development and Function in French Political Thought, 1860-1914”, French History 14, no. 2 (2000): 150-175; G. Varouxakis, Victorian Political Thought on France and the French (Basingstoke : Palgrave, 2002); P. Lege, “La Représentation des Socialistes Français dans l’Oeuvre de John Stuart Mill”, in La France et l’Angleterre, ed. April and Bensimmon, 105-122. Much of this discussion could be strongly rooted in reflection on the histories as well as the contemporary politics of both nations : see for instance, G. Cubbitt, “The Political Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in Bourbon Restoration France”, Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (March, 2007): 73-95. 15 See, for instance, selected essays in C. Crossley and I. Small, eds., Studies in Anglo-French Cultural Relations: Imagining France (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); J. Desmarais, The “Beardsley Industry”: The Critical Reception in England and France, 1893-1914 (London: Ashgate, 1998); and more recently, Christophe Charle, Julien Vincent, and Jay Winter, eds. Anglo-French Attitudes: Comparisons and Transfers between English and French Intellectuals since the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) and A. Radford and V. Reid, eds., Franco-British Cultural Exchanges, 1880-1940 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 16 E. Morris, French Art in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). Interesting insights from this work include the popularity of the French-based religious painter, Ary Scheffer, with British audiences. The fascination of many early nineteenth-century French artists with British history, art and literature is reflected in studies of key figures such as Eugene Delacroix and Paul Delaroche: see the work of Beth S. Wright on Restoration French art, including recently "‘A Better Way to read Great Works”: Lithographs by Delacroix, Roqueplan, Boulanger, and the Déveria Brothers in Gaugain’s Suite of Scott Subjects, 1829-1830”, Word and Image 26 no. 4 (2010): 337-363, and Stephen Bann”s groundbreaking studies of Delaroche, including “Paul Delaroche’s Early Work in the Context of English History”, Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 3 (2006): 341-369. 17 H. Hoock, “The British State and the Anglo-French Wars over Antiquities, 1798-1858”, Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (March, 2007): 49-72. 18 See, for instance, W. Kaiser, “Vive La France! Vive la République? The Cultural Construction of French Identity at the World Exhibitions in Paris, 18551900”, National Identities 1, no. 3(1999): 227-44; W. Kaiser, “Cultural Transfer of Free Trade at World Exhibitions, 1851-1862”, Journal of Modern History 77, no. 3 (September, 2005): 563-90.

Rosemary Mitchell, with Di Drummond and Nathan Uglow

19

25

See S. R. Cole, “National Histories, International Genre: Thackeray, Balzac, and the Franco-British Bildungsroman”, and Julia Kent, “Oscar Wilde’s ‘False Notes’: Dorian Gray and English Realism”, in L.M.E. Goodlad and Julia M. Wright, eds., Special Issue on “Victorian Internationalisms” in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 48 (2007), at http://www.érudit.org/revue/ravon/v/n48. 20 L.M.E. Goodlad, “Cosmopolitanism’s Actually Existing Beyond: Towards a Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic”, Victorian Literature and Culture (September, 2010), 38/4 (September, 2010): 399-411. 21 The proceedings of this colloquium were subsequently published: O.BoucherRivalain and C. Hajdenko-Marshall, eds., Regards des Anglo-Saxons sur la France au Cours du long XIXe Siècle (Paris: L”Harmattan, 2008). 22 J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1981). See also his The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (London and Portland, Oregon: Frank Cass Publishers, 1995). 23 See W. F. Connell, The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold (London: Kegan Paul, 1951) and P. Nash, Culture and the State: Matthew Arnold and Continental Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). More recently, B. Rapple, “Matthew Arnold and Comparative Education”, British Journal of Educational Studies 37, no. 1 (February, 1989): 54-71. 24 R. Holt, “Contrasting Nationalisms: Sport, Militarism, and the Unitary State in Britain and France before 1914”, in Tribal Identities: Nationalism, Europe and Sport, ed. J.A. Mangan (London and Portland, Oregon: Frank Cass Publishers, 1996), 39-45. 25 An interesting complementary reading is Linda Nochlin”s “The Image of the Working Woman” in her Representing Women (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 81-105, which explores Courbet’s and Millet’s iconography and motivation in their depiction of rural women workers, stressing its social conservatism as well as the likely erotic appeal of their subjects to wealthy male patrons. 26 See below, 82. 27 Conrad was not the only fin-de-siécle British writer influenced by Loti: Kristin Embry argues that his affective sensibility shaped the work of the Francophil and cosmopolitan Maria Louisa Ramé: K. Embry, “Towards an Entente Cordiale: The Cultivation of Cosmopolitan Sympathies in Ouida’s Under Two Flags”, Studies in the Novel 42, no. 3 (Fall, 2010): 227-48. 28 Overwhelmingly, scholarship on Carlyle’s depiction of French history focuses on his The French Revolution (1837): see, for instance, among many other publications, A. Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); M. Desaulniers, Carlyle and the Economics of Terror: A Study of Revisionary Gothicism in the French Revolution (Québec: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1995); R. Stott, “Thomas Carlyle and the Crowd: Revolution, Geology, and the Convulsive ‘Nature’ of Time”, Journal of Victorian Culture 1, no. 1 (1999): 1-24. 29 J. Tambling, “Prison-Bound: Dickens and Foucault”, Essays in Criticism 36, no. 1 (1986): 11-31, offers another interesting reading of Dickens’s novels through

26

Introduction

Foucaultian theory, demonstrating how far Dickens’s works anticipate Foucault’s theories of the rise of disciplinary cultures in the nineteenth century. 30 See P. Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896) for the growth of British archaeological societies. 31 Simon Bradley, “The Englishness of the Gothic: Theories and Interpretations from William Gilpin to J.H. Parker”, Architectural History 45 (2002): 325-346, and Boucher-Rivalain's own “Attitudes to Gothic in French Architectural Writings of the 1840s”, Architectural History 41 (1998):145-52. 32 See below, 253-54. 33 Charle et al., Anglo-French Attitudes.

PART I: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: REFLECTIONS ON/OF THE NATIONAL “OTHER”

CHAPTER ONE INVENTING RATHER THAN COPYING? GUSTAVE DORÉ'S PILGRIMAGE TO LONDON FRANÇOISE BAILLET

One of the events of the year 1868, in London, was the opening of the Doré Gallery in New Bond Street. Disappointed with the Parisian establishment’s refusal to acknowledge his talent as a painter, the French artist had recently settled in the British capital where, for twenty-five years, he managed to maintain an ongoing show of his works. Very popular in his day, Gustave Doré (1832-1883) has remained one of the most prominent illustrators of all times. On both sides of the Channel and elsewhere, commentators—Victorian and contemporary, critical or enthusiastic—have tried to understand the success of a man who, in the space of forty years or so, produced no less than ten thousand engravings. Interestingly enough, all comments on Doré’s work—from the first biographies, written by Blanchard Jerrold and Blanche Roosevelt, to Eric Zafran’s recent study—seem to hinge upon a fundamental distinction between fantasy and faithfulness to fact. This dichotomy—indicated in the actual title of Zafran’s 2007 book—is also a central argument in Philippe Kaenel’s Doré: A Realist and a Visionary, and Alan Woods’s 1978 article on “Art and Evidence” in the artist’s production. But as early as 1873, the Art Journal had reviewed Doré and Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage (1872) in similar terms: the illustrator, the columnist had remarked, “was compelled to invent, where his sole business was to copy”.1 Coming to terms with this antagonism is one of the purposes of this chapter, which considers a selection of the London illustrations. The Pilgrimage turns out to be both a fantastic journey to a modern version of Dante’s Divine Comedy—Doré’s famous “inventive” vision of London, mostly based on a constant oscillation between the sublime and the grotesque—and an endless source of social documentation providing precious information on the Victorian society.

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Perhaps the missing link between these aspects of the black-and-white artist’s production concerns the ontological nature of art, as well as the conditions of its reception, as Woods suggests: “it was in the timeless world of fantasy that he was most at home”.2 In his essay on Doré, Eric Zafran similarly admires the inventiveness and virtuosity of a draughtsman whom he defines as prolific and passionate. A century earlier, Blanche Roosevelt had praised the quality of the artist’s sketches, whose “sentiment, tone and pathos” she particularly enjoyed.3 Other observers, however, were more ambivalent about the artist’s artistic license. While admitting the expressiveness of Doré’s style, Philip Gilbert Hamerton, writing in 1864 for the Art Journal insisted on the “many falsities and inaccuracies” of a man who was prone to exaggeration and excess.4 One word, however, recurs. For all commentators, Gustave Doré was “imaginative”. Interested in the “picturesque” aspect of contemporary life more than in anything else, they say, he lived in a “timeless world of fantasy” to which the London drawings bear outstanding testimony.5 In Hamerton’s telling phrase, his work exhibited “sublimity—always sublimity”.6 It is true that such sketches as Hayboats on the Thames or The Docks reveal a genuine sense of the sublime. In these night scenes—and many others in the series—industrial London provides an awe-inspiring background against which men are dwarfed. In both, the natural landscape has been replaced by a forest of masts whose lofty shadows recede in the mist, surrounding the sailors/dockers. The sketches are rendered even more powerful by Doré’s masterly use of contrast and gradation: while in Hayboats the moonlit surface of the craft allows a careful delineation of the sailors’ figures, the white rectangles of the windows in The Docks attract the viewer’s attention to the crowd in the foreground. In The Bull’s-eye, another impressive night scene, Doré also finds inspiration in a harsh Victorian reality—the then common arrests for vagrancy—to produce a dramatic scene. In this picture of contrasts, where space is segmented by the architecture of the house in the background, the vulnerability of the poor is repeatedly emphasised. All eyes, including of course the Bull’s and the viewer’s, are turned towards the homeless, whose slumped figures are framed by the light beam, allowing them no escape from the police. Strikingly symbolical, Doré’s image signifies the power of the patrolmen, whose angular profiles and straight figures form a stark contrast to the irregular features and undulating bodies of the squatting paupers. Maybe this emphatic and engaged portrayal is what Hamerton described as Doré “doing always precisely what suits his purpose”,7 or what Swayne defined as one of the artist´s “eccentricities”.8

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It certainly testifies to a degree of personal involvement in the situations represented: “the best illustrations”, Alan Woods explains, “are those whose subject demanded not a routine, mechanical reproduction of a familiar scene, but ... a striking pictorial fact and which could perhaps be defined as an image of immediate emotional impact”.9 And emotion is undoubtedly present in many of the London pictures. In Resting on the Bridge, Roofless! and Asleep under the Stars, for instance, sentiment prevails. In these three rather similar vignettes, whole families of destitutes are pictured as they huddle on a bridge or in front of a door. If the men—especially one of them in Roofless! who looks drunk—inspire only moderate pity, the women and children cannot but arouse compassion. In Resting on the Bridge, for instance, Doré’s decision to represent the mother as a pietà—turning the homeless woman’s rags into Michelangelesque robes—appeals to the viewer’s Christian feelings and thus increases the pathetic aspect of the sketch, universalising (and possibly sanitising) the subject’s situation. Doré’s inventive vision may also be seen in his rendering of social classes. In the Pilgrimage, strikingly different lighting effects are used to represent rich and poor. “Consistently gloomy for the scenes of poverty, invariably light and airy for the scenes of wealth”,10 the pictures seem to refer more to imagery of heaven and hell, such as the artist had already developed in his illustrations to the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, than to the actual settings and people represented. A comparison of such sketches as Holland House—A Garden Party or The Ladies’ Mile, on the one hand, and Houndsditch or Bluegate Fields, on the other, allows us to discover a rather Manichean world. London high society is thus depicted in rococo indoor or outdoor settings, with small strokes of light figuring the delicacy of foliage or the elegance of women’s crinolines. The poor, conversely, systematically appear in dimly-lit night scenes, even though the very models of the pictures may have been observed in broad daylight, as was the case, for instance, with Asleep under the Stars.

Interpretation Engraving But Doré’s tendency towards stylistic exaggeration did not only originate in his imagination or his emotional response to the world he lived in. His past as a satirist mattered, too. In Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, one of the most moving plates of the London series, several characters’ physical appearance borders on caricature. The girl with the baby in the foreground, for instance, has rather strange features and her right forearm, visible as she holds the baby’s feet, looks almost dislocated. The baby himself, with

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his bulging forehead and deep-set eyes, is reminiscent of such grotesques as appeared daily in the pages of Philipon’s Journal Pour Rire, where Doré had started his career as a cartoonist.11 Technical choices or necessities may also have accounted for some inaccuracies or imprecisions in London. In his biography of the artist, Blanchard Jerrold remembers Doré’s reluctance to make preliminary sketches before carving (which he finally agreed to do on Jerrold’s insistence).12 The artist’s disregard for details may therefore have occasioned a few mistakes, such as the number of runners in the Derby (The Derby–Tottenham Corner), which Doré significantly increased. Besides, Doré’s preference for wood engraving—where the end grain of wood is used as a medium for engraving, thus differing from the older technique of woodcut, where the softer grain was used—meant that his engravers worked from more elaborate drawings which they were not expected to reproduce line by line, but to recreate more freely. This novelty which can be called “interpretation engraving”, Philippe Kaenel explains, greatly increased the engravers’ autonomy—but also their possible “treasons”. Thanks to this technique, Doré, who now entrusted his collaborators with the task of actually completing his drafts, became far more productive, a quality which, however, implied an “entire liberty from all restraints of accuracy”. “No man can work accurately at high speed”, Hamerton continued in the Art Journal, “And it will be found, generally, that the greatest producers are inventors, not copyists of nature, and not even in the degree of representative imitation they allow themselves they are by no means faultless”.13

Doré’s “Social Realism” This widely-accepted view, according to which Doré was an inventor, not a copyist, becomes however all the more surprising as, today, the London plates are sometimes regarded less as works of art than as objective records of mid-Victorian life by many social historians. A former collaborator to the Illustrated London News, Doré could indeed also offer a reporter’s view of the world around him. As early as the 1850s, he had developed a bent towards social realism in his painting and had surprised his friends and critics, Paul Lacroix and Théophile Gautier, with a series of lithographs entitled Paris As It Is. Genuinely interested in the daily life of his contemporaries, he could turn into a fully-fledged commentator or critic, as he did, for instance, during the Crimean War.14 It is no wonder, then, to find in the Pilgrimage a response to economic and social concerns of the day.

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A City Thoroughfare is one of the numerous examples of Doré’s journalistic view of the capital. In this bustling picture of a London road, human activity is what strikes the spectator’s eye first. Cabmen, salesmen, errand boys and pedestrians all address one another while omnibuses and delivery carts vainly attempt to push their way through a crowd, which the policeman in the foreground obviously does not manage to discipline. Doré’s decision to reproduce advertisements on the carriages, or initials on some delivery goods—visible on the parcels in the centre or and on the barrels, on the right—adds to the topicality and apparent authenticity of a plate which, besides, is reminiscent of the documentary panoramas which W. P. Frith and W. M. Egley were producing at the time. Markets are also a recurrent feature of the London illustrations: Billingsgate and Covent Garden are depicted with a concern for accuracy which, however, does not exclude dramatisation. In Billingsgate—Early Morning, for instance, all activities are depicted and made recognisable. In an era when the gospel of work dominates the whole social discourse, time—symbolised by the clock, visible in the background—and money—represented by the banknote in the foreground—both remind the viewer of the realities of the commercial world. Every outfit—from the fishmonger’s to the accountant’s, from the salesman’s to the client’s—is carefully portrayed. Such precision was the result of a keen and repeated observation and even though a rough sketch was the utmost that Doré would take on the spot, his reputedly photographic memory allowed him to produce these detailed views of industrial and commercial London.15 Besides, both Doré’s biographers signal the artist’s insistence on visiting every location he meant to picture: “we spent many days and nights visiting”, says Blanchard Jerrold, and carefully examining the more striking scenes and phases of London life. We had one or two nights in Whitechapel, duly attended by police in plain clothes; we explored the docks ... ; we visited the night refuges; we journeyed up and down the river; we traversed Westminster, and had a morning or two in Drury Lane; ... we entered thieves’ public houses; in short, I led Doré through the shadows and the sunlight of the great world of London.16

The great world of London, with its stations, prisons, its beggars and tradesmen, dockers and dustmen, is certainly one of the key characters of the series. Such prints as Warehousing in the City, The Workmen’s Train or Brewer’s Men inform us about the daily life of nineteenth-century workers. Similarly, pictures such as Over London by Rail offer us a glimpse of the living conditions of thousands of Londoners. Here, from the

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perspective of a railway track, we may look down at the details of Victorian dwellings, with their small backyards, large families and soot-covered clothes-lines. Another aspect of the artist’s accuracy certainly comprises what Henry Mayhew, in London Labour and the London Poor—the four volumes of which, in their 1978 edition, feature Doré’s sketches—called the “humble industries”. From the Lavender Girl to the rag merchant (The Rag Merchant’s Home), almost all the “small trades” which Mayhew had listed twenty years before appear in London: costermongers (Orange Woman), lemonade vendors (Lemonade Vendor), Jewish butchers (Jewish Butcher), and flower girls (Flower Girls/A Flower Girl), each of them with their specific clothing, are faithfully represented. Men, women and children street-sellers (The Match Seller), testify to the innumerable activities Londoners found to survive, while also offering a contemporary reprise of the Georgian pictorial genre of the Cries of London. There is no denying that Gustave Doré had a “preference” for the representation of the destitute. In this book, which Roosevelt interestingly defines as “the outcome of Doré’s visit ... to the dens of the London thieves”,17 poverty prevails. Jerrold confirms and remarks that “the parts of London that riveted Doré’s attention ... were the abiding places of the poor”, a predilection which he attributes to the artist’s “charitable heart” and taste for the “picturesque”.18 This final comment reminds us that even Doré’s social realism has to be seen as another code of representation, a pictorial application of contemporary anthropological and documentary modes.

A Tale of Two Cities: Doré’s London and the Victorians Maybe Doré’s “social realism” lay not so much in his pictorial idiom as in his emotional response to the grim social conditions he saw in England. Despite his intermingling of the real and the fantastic, his somewhat Gothic language and his Manichean, dualistic version of nineteenth-century London, Doré was certainly truthful about the social gulf between rich and poor. Over-dramatised as it may have been, his “tale of two cities” reflected the reality of thousands of Londoners whose privileged or miserable condition other contemporaries had already denounced. Engels, another foreigner discovering industrial Britain, had published his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, while Disraeli’s 1845 Sybil had popularised the phrase “the two nations”. Other commentators had issued books and pamphlets on the subject, such as James Greenwood, whose study The Seven Curses of London was published only a few years before London, the engraver Thomas Shotter

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Boys who, however, had focused much more on the commercial areas of the capital, and of course, Charles Dickens. What strikes the viewer most in Doré’s London is, perhaps, the absence of interaction between rich and poor, a situation which the two “pilgrims”, whose journey to the East End had taken place under police protection, had personally experienced. With their lifelike street sellers and paupers, ethereal garden parties and Turneresque skies, Doré’s London scenes can therefore be experienced as both social documentation and windows on illusion. But rather than a form of antagonism, or what Zafran terms “a shift from the empirical to the fantastic",19 this double characteristic may be interpreted as one of the quintessential elements underlying pictorial expression. But it was not just the two cities of rich and poor which seemed to be portrayed in Doré’s images, but also the two cities of Dickens’s famous novel. Among the various reproaches addressed by most commentators to an artist whose talent they however fully acknowledged, was the “unEnglishness” of his London drawings.20 “Mr Doré”, the Art Journal remarks in 1872, has courted difficulty, and invited criticism. He proposes to give us his views of London. These scenes, with whatever artistic power they are put on paper, are those of a foreigner: and, moreover, of a foreigner unacquainted with the English language. They cannot, therefore, be such representations as will seem natural to the English public.21

The same argument was voiced even by the artist’s collaborator, Jerrold, who spoke of Doré’s lack of familiarity with the English face and his failure to “realize the characteristics of the Saxon race”.22 “It is not there”, the Art Journal argues, “that ‘London’ is to be seen”.23 It is true that such a print as Off Billingsgate offers an interesting example of the influence of the French Realist tradition on Doré, whose fishermen bear a clear resemblance to some of Millet or Daumier’s characters. But the nationality of the draughtsman who, according to Roosevelt, “had too long been accustomed to draw the types of his own country”, does not explain it all.24

“All Art is Conceptual” In his well-known essay on the psychology of pictorial representation, Art and Illusion (1971), Ernst Gombrich explores the links between perception and creation, stressing the role of the painter’s frame of mind in his rendering of the outside world and that “all art is conceptual”.25 “Art”, Gombrich continues, “originates in the human mind, in [the artist’s]

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reactions to the world rather than in the visible world itself ”.26 More than he actually invents or copies, therefore, the painter appeals to a number of visual references—provided both by his pictorial heritage and by his own work—and creates a new work with a familiar vocabulary. This process sheds light on the transformation which a given “reality”—here, nineteenth-century London—undergoes, and corresponds with what we commonly term the “style” of the artist.27 In the Pilgrimage, echoes of Doré’s earlier works—most of which illustrated Milton, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, or the Bible—are numerous. A noteworthy example of this influence is the picture called A House of Refuge—In the Bath where nude figures are seen bathing. On this small vignette, five workhouse residents, one of them sitting on a chair in the foreground, are depicted as they wash under the scrutiny of two supervisors. Their majestic figures, the impressive musculature of which is highlighted by Doré’s use of black and white, stand in sharp contrast with Jerrold’s textual description of the paupers’ “feverish limbs” and “chests torn to rags”.28 A glance at Doré’s illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, on the other hand, or his vignettes for the Bible, where the very same sculptural bodies appear, allows the viewer to measure the impact of that conceptual dimension of art which Gombrich discusses. Mixing the Malt, with its group of bare-chested brewers, and Lambeth Gas Works, where the same strong-bodied demigods are seen working or standing, are other examples of the same construction. But Doré’s pictorial culture, of course, far exceeds his own illustrative production and there is also an obvious connection between several London plates and the pictorial context at large. One of the high society sketches, A Chiswick Fete is thus reminiscent of Gainsborough’s The Mall in St James’s Park (1783), which the French artist could not ignore: the same scattered groups of strollers, the same fluttery leaves, the same peaceful atmosphere. Here, as in all Doré’s West End pictures, light and air prevail and subtle touches of pure white on the women’s dresses recall Gainsborough’s ethereal shapes and delicate brushstrokes. Thieves Gambling, one of the most admirable pictures of the series, reveals another great influence on the artist. In this crowded plate, where a dense group of men, women and children are visible, some of them playing cards, Doré’s masterly use of chiaroscuro is what most strikes the viewer. The lamp or candlestick placed on the gambling table, throws a pale glow on the observers’ faces while allowing the leader’s back-lit figure to emerge forcefully. This is an irresistible reminder of Rembrandt’s 1628 oil on canvas, where the same technique was used to evoke the mysterious appearance of Christ to the pilgrims of Emmaus.

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Beyond the issue of Englishness—or lack of it—lies a more interesting possible explanation for the polarisation of criticism concerning Doré in general, and London in particular, which highlights a conflict between the illustrator’s essentially Romantic heritage and nineteenth-century mainstream aesthetics.

“The Reasoning and Scientific Spirit, Sign of the Age in Which We Live” “Doré needs travel”, Sainte Croix wrote in 1874 in the Art Journal, – I mean a real journey through the terrestrial universe; not a voyage of the imagination amongst golden dreams – a voyage in books with mythical heroes; but one of those journeys which is accomplished laboriously, patiently, on foot, and in the countries of the existing world; ... The reasoning and scientific spirit, sign of the age in which we live, which is familiar with all geographical and local knowledge, that knowledge which carries a man back to his schooldays, renders the man of our time more 29 exigeant and critical, more searching even carping in his examination.

The “reasoning and scientific spirit” which Sainte Croix failed to find in Doré’s London may be interpreted as one of the hallmarks of the Victorian era. At a time when the British society was going through substantial—and potentially threatening—political, economic and social change, the need was felt to reassert a number of values. More connotative than denotative, as Marcia Pointon underlined in her 1993 study of the portrait, painting and the visual arts in general have always played a prescriptive role in what could be termed a “re-ordering” of society.30 When Jerrold and Doré embarked on their London project, the Ruskinian interdependence between ethics and aesthetics already largely influenced British art and art criticism. The dominant art discourse, represented by such painters as W. P. Frith or Frederic Leighton, favoured a spirit of historical, architectural, and/or sociological accuracy, partly rejecting what was seen as the “golden dreams” of the Romantics or the superficiality of some Continental painters. This could explain, for instance, the nature of Jerrold´s initial project—a synthesis of all human, social and urban types in London, which he later gave up—or his striking insistence, in the preface of London, on the impossibility of providing a comprehensive vision of the British capital.31 Besides, the choice made the author and artist to portray actual places and events—such as railway stations, busy streets or Derby Day, for instance, which Frith had famously and very minutely represented—both generated comparison with such works of

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social observation, and increased the contemporary demand for sociological precision—and possibly social prescription? Another bone of contention, finally, could have been the possible tension between the Victorians’ troubled vision of themselves and what the French artist saw in London, which might well have inspired reflections on Doré’s so-called “un-Englishness”, a British othering of the uncomfortable artist which could defuse the unsettling implications of his apocalyptic vision of the city. In his article, Alan Woods develops the interesting thesis that Doré’s status as a foreigner greatly influenced his perception and rendering of the ruptures of the Victorian society.32 Because London: A Pilgrimage reactivated the spectre of urban poverty— one of the hardest human consequences of industrialisation—such clarity inevitably spelled out that “insecurity of success” the Victorians were suffering from, and raised the spectacle of French-style revolutions on British soil.

Conclusion In 1866, the Art Journal was reviewing Doré’s Bible in the following terms: Doré is an improvvisatore, and this accounts, in a great degree, both for the popularity of his work and its faults. The public has always had a great natural liking and admiration for those gifts of readiness, facility, and prompt application which go to form the faculty of improvisation ... And the very popularity of Doré is in itself a circumstance to be noted against his chances of recognition by the highest class.33

Written only a few years before London was published, this column sheds interesting light on the nature and workings of Victorian art criticism. Popularity and recognition, says the writer, are mutually exclusive ideals whose antagonism reflects what, more than a century later, Bourdieu called the “progressive autonomy of the field of art”.34 By reasserting the legitimacy of the “true critic’s” voice, the Art Journal posits the existence of an artistic elite to which an illustrator, however talented he may be, could not belong. This view, which also prevailed in France at the time, was partly responsible for Doré’s wish to “kill the illustrator” and let the painter live. The nineteenth-century critics’ cautious opinion on an artist, whose pictures are now said to “rival Dickens’s prose in evoking the atmosphere of nineteenth-century London”,35 remains one of the numerous expressions of the complex and sometimes strained relationship between art and the society in which it thrives. Exploring it

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further could be another of the legacies that Doré’s beautiful London drawings have passed on to the Victorians, and thence to us.

Bibliography Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Anonymous. “London: A Pilgrimage”. The Art Journal 12 (1873): 64. —. “Pictures of London”. The Art Journal 11 (1872): 89. Bourdieu, Pierre. Les Règles de l’Art. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Carlier, Sylvie, Lacambre, Jean, and Roquebert, Anne. L’Enfer Doré : Dante et Virgile dans le Neuvième Cercle de l’Enfer. Bourg-en-Bresse: Monastère Royal de Brou, 2005. Cowling, Mary. Victorian Figurative Painting. London: Andreas Papadakis, 2000. Dyos, Harold J. Exploring the Urban Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Dyos, Harold. J. and Wolff, Michael. The Victorian City. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Genette, Gérard. L’Oeuvre de l’Art Immanence et Transcendance. Paris : Seuil, 1994. Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Greenwood, James. The Seven Curses of London. 1869. Repr. with an introduction by Jeffrey Richards. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. Hamerton, Philip Gilbert. “Gustave Doré”. The Fine Arts Quarterly Review 3 (1864-65): 1-25. —. “Gustave Doré’s Bible”. The Fortnightly Review 4 (1866): 669-681. Hoppen, K. Theodore. The Mid-Victorian Generation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Jerrold, Blanchard. Life of Gustave Doré. London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1891. Jerrold, Blanchard and Doré, Gustave. London: A Pilgrimage. 1872. Repr. London: Anthem Press, 2005. Kaenel, Philippe. Le Métier d’Illustrateur Rodolphe Töpffer, J. J. Grandville, Gustave Doré. Genève: Droz, 2005. Klingender, Francis D. Art and the Industrial Revolution, (1947) 1972. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. 4 vols. New York: Dover Publications, 1968.

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Murray, Chris, ed. Key Writers on Art: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century. London: Routledge, 2003. Noël, Bernard. Londres de Gustave Doré. Paris: Armand Colin, 1984. Pointon, Marcia. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth_Century England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993. Renonciat, Annie. La Vie et l’Oeuvre de Gustave Doré. Paris: ACR Editions, 1983. Roosevelt, Blanche. Life and Reminiscences of Gustave Doré. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1885. Sainte Croix de, L. R. “Gustave Doré”. The Art Journal 13 (1874): 315-6. Swayne, G.C. “Gustave Doré”. Once a Week 11 (1864): 83-84. Thompson, F. M. L., ed. The Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol. 2: People and their Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Vizetelly, Henry. Glances Back Through Seventy Years : Autobiographical and other Reminiscences. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1893. Woods, Alan. “Doré’s London : Art and Evidence”. Art History 1, no. 3 (September 1978): 341-59. Zafran, Eric, ed. Fantasy and Faith: The Art of Gustave Doré. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

Notes 1

“London: A Pilgrimage”, The Art Journal 12 (1873): 64. Alan Woods, “Doré’s London : Art and Evidence”, Art History, 1, no. 3 (1978): 341-42. 3 Blanche Roosevelt, Life and Reminiscences of Gustave Doré (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1885), 366-67. 4 Philip Gilbert Hamerton, “Gustave Doré”, The Fine Arts Quarterly Review 3 (1864-65): 25. 5 Woods, “Doré’s London”, 341-42. 6 Philip Gilbert Hamerton, “Gustave Doré’s Bible”, The Fortnightly Review 4 (1866): 675. 7 Hamerton, “Gustave Doré”, 25. 8 G.C. Swayne, “Gustave Doré”, Once a Week 11 (1864): 84. 9 Woods, “Doré’s London”, 344. 10 Ibid., 345. 11 For Doré’s early career, see Blanchard Jerrold, Life of Gustave Doré (London: W. H. Allen & Co.,1891), 25-33. 2

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12 Jerrold, Life, 153-4. Also Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back Through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and other Reminiscences (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893), 390. 13 Hamerton, “Gustave Doré”, 3-4. 14 For Doré’s Crimean work, see Jerrold, Life, 57-65. 15 Ibid., 153-4. 16 Ibid., 151-153. 17 Roosevelt, Life, 366. 18 Jerrold, Life, 184. 19 Eric Zafran, ed.. Fantasy and Faith: The Art of Gustave Doré (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 20. 20 Roosevelt, Life, 366-67. 21 “Pictures of London”, The Art Journal 11 (1872): 89. 22 Jerrold, Life, 204. 23 “Pictures of London”, 89 24 Roosevelt, Life, 366-7. 25 Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 87. 26 Ibid., 87. 27 “The ‘temperament’ or ‘personality’ of the artist, his selective preferences may be one of the reasons for the transformation which the motif undergoes under the artist’s hands, but there must be others—everything, in fact, which we bundle together under the word ‘ style’, the style of the period or the style of the artist”. Ibid., 64. 28 Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, London: A Pilgrimage (1872; repr., London: Anthem Press, 2005), 169. 29 L.R. De Sainte Croix, “Gustave Doré”, The Art Journal 13 (1874): 315. 30 Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). 31 Jerrold and Doré. London: A Pilgrimage, xxviii-xxx. 32 Woods, “Doré’s London”, 350. 33 Hamerton, “Gustave Doré’s Bible”, 670. 34 Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’Art (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 85. 35 Zafran, Fantasy and Faith, 101-2.

CHAPTER TWO THE “LE PLAY MOVEMENT” AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ENGLAND’S EDUCATIONAL REPUTATION JULIETTE POCHAT

England enjoys today a great reputation as far as education is concerned, a reputation which confers prestige and secures influence in Europe. This acknowledgement invites a number of questions: how was England’s educational reputation constructed? Why was it built? And above all, can we say that this reputation is an established fact? Certainly it can be explained partly by the plethora of books which were published in nineteenth-century France, the aim of which was to laud the English education system. Hippolyte Taine, Count Montalembert, Paul de Rousiers, and in particular Frédéric Le Play were among those who extolled the neighbouring country’s educational arrangements. We may then ask ourselves how the publication of these books legitimised this reputation and, additionally, how they helped England to impose itself as the educational model to follow, as much in the past as in the present. In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to consider what was said of England in France in the second half of the nineteenth century: did the opinion of the French have any influence on the representations of the English education system? This chapter explores the impact of the work of one man, Frédéric Le Play, utilising both his correspondence and the writings of his disciples. At a time when French revolutionary experiences were seen by many as harmful for the country, a movement lauding English conservatism and English educational institutions was a natural development. As a result, the English education system was rapidly deemed to be superior by the French, since it was believed to enable the preservation of an elite class with high moral standards. No comprehensive biography of Le Play has ever been written: scholars have tended to focus on aspects of his career and achievement, dealing

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with Le Play the technologist and the engineer, but also the social scientist and the social thinker.1 But very little has ever been written about his perception of England, and his role in the creation of England’s great educational reputation. This chapter is intended to redress this neglect. Firstly, I will offer a rapid review of the political and educational context in the second half of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Channel. Then this chapter will consider Frédéric Le Play and the “Le Play school”: the impact of Le Play and his followers will be explored, with particular reference to how their writings contributed to the construction of England’s reputation. Finally, I will indicate how the networks and the exchanges between France and England—the partial praises of the former and the self-interested borrowings of the latter—both contributed to building the myth of the English schoolboy, and more generally a myth about English schools. As David Bridges points out, the educational market, at mid-century, “was a highly differentiated one, divided into a sharply demarcated series of concentric sectors, access to which was limited by income and therefore by social class”.2 Social mobility was rare and the discourses of democracy and of meritocracy had limited purchase.3 Schools were grouped as “superior”, “middling” and “inferior”—catering respectively for upper, middle and working classes. However, a growing desire for the extension of education to all the social classes was apparent, the result of wider social and economic changes. Pressure was first exerted by the nascent teaching profession for the extension of education. In Britain, the National Union of Teachers was founded in 1870 and, as a result, the profession started to organise itself. Pressure was also exerted by the demands of organised labour: other trade unions progressively gained respectability in the course of the century, finally achieving full legal recognition and rights.4 Additionally, pressure was exerted by industrialists—together with politicians themselves—in the face of the perceived threat posed by powerful new international competitors, such as Germany, or worse still, the United States of America. England seemed to have lost its gift for technical invention, a gift which was seen to have made it great in the past. Numerous calls were thus made across the political spectrum for a refocusing of national efficiency and imperial leadership through collectivist agencies. Moreover, two events had a great impact on the revision of the education systems in France and in England. In England, the Second Reform Act of 1867, which enfranchised most male householders and abolished compounding, encouraged reflection on the deficiencies of working-class education. In France, in the aftermath of the Franco-

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Prussian war in 1870, there was a similar recognition that France had fallen a long way behind as far as higher education was concerned, and was paling into insignificance in comparison with prestigious German universities. Consequently, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the education systems of both France and England underwent unprecedented reform and evolution: both countries had to remain competitive in the world by being at the forefront of manufacture and improvement. In France, the Loi Falloux of 15 March 1850, among other measures, organised primary and secondary education.5 But the most important education acts were the Ferry Acts (16 June 1881 and 28 March 1882) which made primary education free, non-clerical, and mandatory.6 In England, the 1870 Elementary Education Act, commonly known as the Forster Act, set the framework for schooling of all children over the age of five and under thirteen.7 In the boroughs where a substantial educational shortfall was observed, school boards would be created in order to organise this additional provision. However, despite the introduction of similar educational reforms in both countries at the time, priorities remained different. While France was involved in an egalitarian project, England seemed more attached to its “Victorian” values and traditions. In France, the stress was put on technical education, whereas in England there was still more interest in the education of the aristocracy and the gentry, or at least of the higher classes. It was in this context that Frédéric Le Play began to think about the conditions for a moral and social reform of his country. To do so, for nearly a quarter of a century, he travelled around Europe and collected a vast amount of material on the social condition of the working classes. These contributed to the publication of his two major works: Les Ouvriers Européens in 1855, and La Réforme Sociale en France in 1864. The first book was a great event for economists, and the prize which the Académie des Sciences awarded Le Play gave him respectability and influence. Armed with this prestige, Le Play founded the Société Internationale des Études Pratiques d’Économie Sociale in 1856, the aim of which was to further empirical studies. In his second book, Le Play aimed to describe the social illnesses of France, as the downfall of the nation appeared imminent to him.8 It was an immediate and resounding success, gaining a wide circulation on both sides of the Channel, and, from then on, the “Le Play movement” (mouvement leplaysien) greatly increased in scale. Le Play defined two spirits, the French spirit and the English spirit, which he contrasted in order to highlight the superiority of the latter. He argued that, while England had an ideological tradition to be envied, France, on the other hand, had a revolutionary heritage, which made it

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very fragile and prone to reform and major changes. The idea of education for all was on everyone’s lips in France, an idea which was anathema to Frédéric Le Play: for him, nothing seemed to have changed since 1789 and, indeed, the economic, political and social situation had worsened. As a result, Le Play celebrated the freedoms of the “Free-born Englishman” against the perceived servitude of continental despotism. Paul de Rousiers, in La Question Ouvrière en Angleterre, took up Disraeli’s words to define the English spirit: “The mind of England is the mind ever of the rising race”.9 Therefore, in a strained political context, Le Play naturally turned towards England to find answers to the evils afflicting the French society. With the establishment of the Société Internationale and through their journal entitled La Réforme Sociale (founded in 1881), Le Play and his followers took a critical look at France and its institutions. The burden of their song was unequivocal: they portrayed the English system as virtually ideal. The superior inventiveness, industry, and productivity of the British Empire, and its success in encouraging Anglo-Saxon stock to settle in the colonies, were clear evidence of its hegemony and influence. Logically enough, Le Play and his disciples postulated that English schools were equally superior and that they had been founded in the image of the English spirit and morale. First of all, English schools were deemed superior in that they allowed individuals initiative and imagination to express themselves. Hippolyte Taine, in Notes sur l’Angleterre, argued that while the English schoolboy blossomed, the French schoolboy was trained to become “a pure brain, a sedentary legless cripple.”10 The education which the English boy received was much better in that it taught young men to become gentlemen. Furthermore, English schools were superior in their relation to both the body and the soul: they encouraged the development of a sound mind in a sound body. In particular, French authors uniformly emphasised the advantages gained by the primacy of sport and physical exercise in English schools and colleges. On that subject, Pierre de Coubertin, a member of the Société Internationale, set out to enlighten public opinion. After several trips to England between July 1883 and November 1887, he announced his conviction during a conference on 18 April 1887 that the public school system was the philosopher’s stone of the British Empire. Paschal Grousset played a similar role. After participating in the Commune and being deported to New Caledonia in 1872, he established himself in London in 1874 and progressively adopted English customs, habits, morals, and culture. He returned to France after the 1880 amnesty and tried to introduce English sport methods into French secondary schools. Under the pseudonym of André Laurie, Grousset published a collection of

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books entitled La Vie de Collège dans Tous Les Pays in fourteen volumes. In each volume, he described an educational environment in a given country and period: in 1884, La Vie de Collège en Angleterre came out. It was largely inspired by Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) by Thomas Hughes. The novel’s cover, by Paul Dominique Philippoteaux, reflected the perceived preponderance of sport in English colleges and the wellbeing which he believed it brought to pupils.

Fig. 2.1: P.D. Philippoteaux, cover illustration for Paschal Grousset, La Vie de Collège en Angleterre (1884).

The values conveyed in English schools were perceived as equally superior. The importance of the family, individuality, and customs was seen to be transmitted to children and, to Le Play, the most powerful social control was the force of custom and the cement of society was the family. As such, Le Play condemned the military culture of French secondary

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schools, and the cold atmosphere which reigned within their gates. He and his followers compared the lycées to big cramming schools (boîtes à bachots) or to “stone-built boxes in which you enter through a unique hole equipped with a gate and a porter.”11 Logically enough, Le Play thus praised the small and human-sized English schools which reproduced the warmth of the family household. Moreover, those schools were seen as always situated in villages, in idyllic, almost Edenic settings, surrounded by nature, rivers, and all kinds of animals: spaces in which the pupils could learn peacefully and become gentlemen. This idyll is clearly depicted in the illustration which P. Philippoteaux made for Grousset’s book La Vie de Collège en Angleterre, but also in the numerous illustrations one can find throughout Hippolyte Taine’s book.

Fig. 2.2: Illustration to Hippolyte Taine, Notes sur l’Angleterre (1872).

Finally, Le Play insisted on an essential aspect of English schools: the elite was cherished. Learning was adapted to the different needs of society, and social harmony was achieved by a ruling class who sought the common good. In France, new developments (such as those engendered by the French Revolution) had destabilised this elite class and destroyed familiar social landmarks, producing a disrupted society, which was not the case in England where stability reigned. As such, Le Play and his followers believed that educational reformers erred when they saw the future of civilisation in the organisation of a vast system of public

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instruction: the masses were intellectually inept and the only education they really needed was a religious one. Le Play and his followers played a key role in creating a positive image of the English educational system. One work had a tremendous impact on the construction of Britain’s reputation: To What Do The AngloSaxons Owe Their Superiority? (A Quoi Tient La Supériorité des AngloSaxons?) by Edmond Demolins (1898).

Fig. 2.3 : Front cover to Edmond Demolins, A Quoi Tient La Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons? (1898).

Demolins’s aim was to make French people realise their weaknesses and to encourage them to imitate the nation which he saw as the greatest power on earth (as explicitly shown by the map on the front cover). The answer Demolins gave to the question that he asked in the title of his book was twofold, and it was supposedly based on an exemplary scientific approach. The superiority of the English was attributed firstly to their racial superiority and, secondly, to their great education system, which was realist and pragmatic. The English were concerned to develop the “whole man” and not civil servants unable to think by and for themselves: “The Anglo-Saxon education develops to the highest degree the taste and

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the need for independence. The English praise the struggle for life and self-help.”12 Despite the multiplicity of the eulogies of the English circulating in France, another trend could be observed at the time, even if it was not as widespread. M. J. Philipp for example, using the pseudonym Arnold, wrote in 1899 To What Do the French Owe Their Superiority Over the Anglo-Saxons?, an overt reply to Demolins, whom he harshly nicknamed sometimes “the scholar”, sometimes “the panegyrist of the AngloSaxons”. Philipp courageously and unusually challenged Le Play and his supporters, clearly distressed by the perception that the French public was more intent on believing Le Play than himself. And indeed, it was the writings of Le Play and his disciples which prevailed: it was on these works that press articles relied, and by these that the politicians were inspired. Philipp wrote: There is a final observation which I have to make, to my great regret … Here it is: the English peril is not only across the Channel, but it is also present here. Everyone has been able to notice with what craze we jump at everything that is British … To make a long story short, to all our evils we can add another one: i.e. Anglomania.13

How can this Anglomania be explained? How were Le Play’s and his disciples’ ideas spread in Europe, and in what way did they influence other countries and help to construct England’s educational reputation? The answer to this question is straightforward: their opinion was conveyed by an active propaganda movement which took various forms. The phrase “Le Play School” was first used in the 1850s and, from then on, their ideology spread rapidly. In 1881, a fortnightly review devoted to both the promotion of research and action was founded (La Réforme Sociale), and it was edited by no other than Edmond Demolins. It had a wide distribution, and it was read by the intelligentsia. Le Play and his followers also played active roles in politics. Napoleon III, who himself admired the British Empire, appointed Le Play councillor of state in 1855. For the next ten years, he was thus employed in a series of official investigations. Finally, the English press acted as an intermediary between leplaysian ideologues and the English people, using their writings in support of selfcelebratory publicity. One could read for instance, in 1899, in the Glasgow Herald: “We can find nothing to question in the facts which Mr Demolins sets out. Although he displays a great love for his country, he makes it hear truths that are salutary.”14 The Morning Advertiser was just as laudatory as The Glasgow Herald: “According to what we have just said, Mr Demolins’s book deserves to be read all over England. Not often does

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a foreigner praise John Bull so highly.”15 This active publicity movement therefore contributed to the construction of England’s educational reputation, with both French writers and activists and the presses of both countries collaborating to construct the iconic image of the English schoolboy, and more generally, a myth of the English (public) school. Le Play set out to collect data, classify this data, and then derive from it some general laws of society: in other words, to carry out a sociological study. But he was quickly met by a problem novel in his day: how to select the problems to be investigated. In a letter written to Charles de Ribbe, he wrote: We have a lot to do to complete the fundamentals of the science. What I have written rests upon the observation of 300 families, and we should have thousands. Our science is still in the imperfect state that mineralogy would be if you had only studied the minerals.16

The actual method that Le Play adopted was to study a culture through a representative family. But this method was inherently flawed, and meant that he only took a limited or narrow view of things, focusing on one part of the problem he examined. His examination of education was equally limited. When he described English schools in his books, he always referred to public schools without clearly stating it. This means that one public school became the prototype of all English schools, as much as one family became the prototype of all English families. Consequently, Le Play often drew premature conclusions from his researches. It seems that he felt compelled to draw some practical conclusions when his country was in imminent danger (before the revolutions, for instance, which he presaged). With France in such a state of disorder, as he saw it, he felt that he had to find an alternative route for national social and political development. For methodical reasons, Le Play apparently wanted to forget the dark side of English life and experience, focussing on positive aspects alone because they were those that could suggest reforms in France. Philipp criticised Demolins for his partiality: In a book I have just finished reading in which you intend to establish the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons, you have only dealt with a small part of the education system in England and you have drawn dangerous conclusions from this brief survey.17

Indeed, contrary to what the leplaysians kept repeating, the English education system had of course many latent defects. However, the rhetoric used was powerful and the myth of the English schoolboy was successfully created at the time. What was that myth then?

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It is clear that literature played the central role in dissemination of the image of the English schoolboy and the English undergraduate. Hippolyte Taine, for instance, referred his readers to novels so as to get a clear view of what English university life was. He thus suggested Tom Brown at Oxford by Thomas Hughes or The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green by Bede Cuthbert, the pseudonym of Edward Bradley.

Fig. 2.4: Edward Bradley [under the pseudonym Bede Cuthbert], title page, The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1853).

Both these novels, which dealt primarily with university life, not school life, only conveyed a partial image of what university life in England was like. Notwithstanding that flaw, literature was used by authors such as Taine both as a medium and as a proof of England’s superiority: one may well doubt of the veracity of the facts Taine relayed to his readers. Another example of literature as the vehicle for the creation and circulation of the image of the English schoolboy is Grousset’s book La Vie de Collège en Angleterre (1884). As it was part of the Jules Hetzel collection, it was meant to be read by young people and more especially by French pupils. In this novel, the Grivaud family has just settled in

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England, near Dover. Laurent, the eldest son, is going to attend an English boarding school, Hobham College. When he arrives there, he is astonished by the “graceful and elegant scenery”18. He is then introduced to an English pupil, Harry Stubbs, whose appearance differs greatly from Laurent’s. Confronted with the elegant, handsome, and well-developed English fellow, poor Laurent pales into insignificance.

Figs. 2.5 and 2.6 : P.D. Philippoteaux, illustrations to Paschal Grousset, La Vie de College en Angleterre (1884).

Everywhere Laurent is described as appearing in an inferior position and posture. Both illustrations perfectly reflect Laurent’s inferiority: his small size and paleness make him look petty and fragile; he does not respect the English dressing code (his white suit and hat are inappropriate and laughable); he does not seem to know how to act and react in an English environment (in the second image, he is eating Harry’s breakfast). In the core of the text, Laurent is also described as clumsy, ill-at-ease and insignificant: his head is “big and dishevelled”, his clothes are “tight”, his limbs are “spindly”, whereas Harry is “tall”, “handsome”, “thin, athletic and slender”.19 Examples of the kind could be multiplied, but would be wearisome to read. The illustrations and textual examples give an adequate idea of the contrasting images of the French and English schoolboys which was

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conveyed and transmitted to French pupils. It is noteworthy that Grousset’s book was a resounding success and that numerous adaptations were made for schools, sometimes supported by exercises, notes, and vocabulary. However, the representations of the English schoolboy that we find here had nothing to do with the kind of images one could find in England at approximately the same time.20 To return to the initial question established in the introduction: how was England’s educational reputation constructed? It now appears that, even if some hostile and anti-establishment voices could be heard, what came out of Le Play and his followers’ writings was an unequivocal celebration of the English education system. Taking care to evade the issue of working-class education, and the need to explain social inequalities in a rational and reasoned way, they managed to display England to the average reader as a nation composed of free and enlightened men, a nation whose educational institutions were of an unequalled and incomparable quality. It is in that sense that we can say that they contributed to creating an English myth. Le Play died in 1872, but he left an indisputable and lasting legacy behind him. His followers continued to perpetuate his ideas. Generations of English politicians, within the British Parliament itself, continued to use Le Play’s eulogies and praises, duly selected for their positive and optimistic tone, in order to conciliate public opinion and to justify an education policy which was in many respects unequal and elitist, often leaving to the state the role of arbiter.

Bibliography Arnault, F. Frédéric Le Play : De la Métallurgie à la Science Sociale. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993. Bradley, E. The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green. London: James Blackwood, 1853. Bridges, D. and Maclaughlin, T. Education and the Market Place. London: The Falmer Press, 1994. Coubertin, P. de. L’Éducation Anglaise, extract from La Réforme Sociale. Paris : Au Secrétariat de la Société d’Économie Sociale, 18 Avril, 1887. Demogeot, J. and Montucci, H. De l’Enseignement Secondaire en Angleterre et en Ecosse. Paris : Rapport adressé à S.E.M. le Ministre de l’Instruction Publique, 1867. Demolins, E. A Quoi Tient La Supériorité Anglo-Saxonne? Paris: FirminDidot, 1897.

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Ferry, J. Jules Ferry et l’Ecole. Paris: Société Commerciale et Industrielle de Presse, 1984. Grousset, P. Scènes de la Vie de Collège dans Tous les Pays – La Vie de Collège en Angleterre. Paris : J. Hetzel, 1884. Jackson, P. Education Act Forster: A Political Biography of W.E. Forster. Madison, New Jersey : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Le Play, M. F. La Réforme Sociale en France, Déduite de l’Observation comparée des Peuples Européens, 2 vols. Slatkine, Genève – Paris, 1864. —. La Constitution de l’Angleterre, considérée dans ses Rapports avec la Loi de Dieu et les Coutumes de la Paix Sociale, vol. 1. Tours : Alfred Mame et Fils, Libraires-Editeurs, 1875. Michel, H. La Loi Falloux, 4 Janvier 1849-15 Mars 1850. Paris: Hachette, 1901. Montalembert, Charles Forbes de. De l’Avenir Politique de l’Angleterre. Paris : Didier and Co., Libraires-Editeurs, 1857. Nouvel, M. Frédéric Le Play : Une Réforme Sociale sous le Second Empire. Paris: Economica, 2009. Philipp, M. J.. A Quoi Tient La Supériorité des Français sur Les AngloSaxons? Paris : Fayard Frères, 1899. Ribbe, C. de. Le Play, d’après sa Correspondance. Paris : Firmin-Didot, 1884. Rousiers, P. de. La Question Ouvrière en Angleterre. Paris : Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1895. Simon, B. Education and the Labour Movement, 1870-1920. London: Laurence and Wishart, 1965. Taine, H. Notes sur l’Angleterre. Paris : Librairie Hachette, 1872.

Notes 1

See, for instance: F. Arnault, Frédéric Le Play : De la Métallurgie à la Science Sociale (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993) and M. Nouvel, Frédéric Le Play : Une Réforme Sociale sous le Second Empire (Paris: Economica, 2009). 2 D. Bridges and T. Maclaughlin, Education and the Market Place (London: The Falmer Press, 1994), 11. 3 Ibid. 4 B. Simon, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870-1920 (London: Laurence and Wishart, 1965). 5 H. Michel, La Loi Falloux, 4 Janvier 1849-15 Mars 1850 (Paris: Hachette, 1901). 6 J. Ferry, Jules Ferry et l’Ecole (Paris: Société Commerciale et Industrielle de Presse, 1984).

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P. Jackson, Education Act Forster: A Political Biography of W.E. Forster (Madison, New Jersey : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997). 8 He identified poor politicians, very high tax rates, too many civil servants, and the explosion of socialist doctrines as key issues, the root of all these problems being the failure of the French education system. 9 P. de Rousiers, La Question Ouvrière en Angleterre (Paris: Librairie de FirminDidotet, 1895), 528-529. 10 H. Taine, Notes sur l’Angleterre (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1872), 138. 11 Ibid., 136: “de grandes boîtes de pierre où l’on entre par un seul trou muni d’une grille et d’un portier”. 12 E. Demolins, A Quoi Tient La Supériorité Anglo-Saxonne ? (Paris: FirminDidot, 1898), 106-108: “Cette éducation anglo-saxonne développe au plus haut degré le goût et le besoin d’indépendance. … Les Anglais vantent la lutte pour la vie : struggle for life ; l’aptitude à se tirer aux-même d’affaire soi-même : selfhelp.” 13 M. J. Philipp, A Quoi Tient La Supériorité des Français sur Les Anglo-Saxons? (Paris : Fayard Frères, 1899), 178: “Il est une constatation finale que je suis obligé de faire, à mon vif regret … Cette constatation, la voici : le péril anglais n’est pas seulement outre-Manche, il est aussi chez nous… Tout le monde a pu remarquer avec quel engouement nous nous jetons sur les productions britanniques… Bref, à tous nos maux, nous pouvons ajouter un autre : ‘l’Anglomanie’”. 14 Cited in Demolins, A Quoi Tient, 439. 15 Cited in ibid., 440 16 C de Ribbe, Le Play, d’après sa Correspondance (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1884). 17 Philipp, A Quoi Tient, 30: “Dans un livre que je viens de lire et où vous avez l’intention d’établir la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons, vous n’avez traité qu’une bien modeste partie du système d’éducation en Angleterre et vous en avez tiré de ce léger aperçu de graves conclusions.” 18 P. Grousset, La Vie de Collège en Angleterre (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1884), 10: “Laurent fut vivement impressionné par ce spectacle gracieux et élégant.” 19 Ibid., 11: “Laurent resta planté devant son nouvel ami, sans trouver un mot à dire. Nous sommes obligés d’en convenir, il représentait assez mal la patrie française, avec sa grosse tête ébouriffée, son col en désordre, ses vêtements étriqués, ses membres grêles, devant le grand beau gaillard auquel il venait d’être présenté. Harry Stubbs n’avait que quinze ans, mais il en paraissait dix-huit ; il était bien pris, mince, élancé, avec de larges épaules, des jambes bien dessinées et des bras d’athlète…”. 20 See, for instance: B. Simon, Education, 145.

CHAPTER THREE BRITISH RAILWAYMEN IN FRANCE: THE (IN)COMPREHENSIONS OF BRITISH RAILWAY BUILDERS ON FRANCE’S EARLY LINES DI DRUMMOND

Introduction There never was a line opened to the public in a better working state … There could be no better proof of the solidarity of these works than the fact that the Government engineers (whether from envy or more laudable feeling he did not know), had done all in their power to crush the viaducts, by laying weights upon them … He then alluded to the extraordinary opposition that the Company had met with the authorities of the city of Rouen—an opposition that showed much more selfishness than patriotism …1

In March 1847 a ceremony was held to mark the inauguration of the British-financed and British-built Paris-Le Havre railway. After a vote of thanks, the famous Yorkshire-born chief railway engineer of the new line, Joseph Locke, is reported to have made a speech which “alluded” to the “extraordinary and vexatious delays” that the French Ministry of Works, the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées caused to his railway project. These were not the only faults that leading British railway engineers and contractors of the time found in the French.2 In contemporary biographies of Locke and his British contractor colleague on the Paris-Le Havre and Rouen railways, Thomas Brassey, both men were highly critical of the local French urban populations and of the French labour force. According to Joseph Locke’s biographer Joseph Devey, Locke felt that French contractors and labourers could only carry out half the work of their British counterparts. The structures that the French built were said to be as

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undependable as their supposed characters: neither “could … be relied upon even for safety and stability”.3 In contrast to these supposed shortcomings of the French, the biographers saw the British railway constructors as a technologically superior “invading force” in France, come to save the French from their retarded and tardy ways. This was richly ironic: the Barentin viaduct, constructed by Brassey on the very railway under consideration here, the Rouen to Le Havre line, had collapsed in January 1846.4 The biographies also claimed that the French did not resist the force of British ingenuity. According to Devey, while France’s early railways were constructed by “Protestant sinews, out of Protestant capital and with Protestant implements … there was no cry of proselytism” on the part of the French. Rather, the “native population rejoiced as much over the affair as if it had been their own work.”5 Locke’s words and Devey’s conclusions were not perhaps surprising, given the degree of British/ English chauvinism prevalent in the period. However, even by this time, France had begun to develop its own railways.6 So Locke’s and Brassey’s own visions of France, the French government, its people and labour force, together with those of their biographers, clearly constituted huge incomprehensions, national and racial stereotypes which often flew in the face of contemporary evidence about the French and their activities and practices. However, these incomprehensions are important for they not only reveal much about changing contemporary British perceptions of the relationship between the British and French nations, but in the process, the social construction of the ideal of what it meant to be British or, more often in these texts, “English”. It is often argued that it was in the formation and governance of the British colonies that the British/English “determine[d] what they did not want to be and they thought they were”. However, other excursions, in this case nearer to home, or even meeting foreign people in Britain, also provided similar opportunities for redefining British/English identity. It should also be noted that it was the “English” rather than the British identity that took precedence here, “English [being] the hegemonic identity.” 7 This new genre of biographical writing on the great emergent engineers, scientists, and inventors of the Victorian era, or the English railway entrepreneur, engineer, contractor, and navvy working abroad during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, portrayed such men as a new type of British hero. Notions of nationhood and national identity were reconstructed through such life-writings. However, these new constructions of identity were not purely a product of this new genre of biographies. The experiences of these new British/Englishmen, such as those of Locke and

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Brassey, also played an important part: their personal contact with “foreigners” was of great importance. Daily in their work constructing railways, either at home where they met navvies of non-English stock, or, as in the case of the study in this chapter, when they ventured abroad, such men encountered the “other”, one who was “foreign” and markedly different from themselves and their social norms. While these eminent British men undoubtedly took ever-changing contemporary racial attitudes towards the “other” overseas with them, in making such contact their own views of “the other” were also being dynamically remade. The popular biographies, together with reports such as the Illustrated London News article quoted at the beginning of this chapter, then recorded these English engineers’ and contractors’ voices, disseminating their views of the foreign “other” to the British public. It is these railway engineers’ and contractors’ incomprehensions of the French and other Continental groups, the generation of the “other”, and the role of this conceptualisation and of the biographers in redefining of aspects of British national identity which will be the focus of this chapter. First of all, however, the sources and theoretical approaches for this study will be considered.

Sources and Theoretical Approaches: The Lives of the Engineers and the Role of British Engineers and Contractors and their Incomprehensions of the French “Other” in Redefining British National Identity Four main historical sources will be used in this chapter. These are Joseph Devey’s The Life of Joseph Locke. Civil Engineer, MP, FRS, Etc. Etc (1862), Arthur Helps’s The Life and Labours of Thomas Brassey (1872), and two much earlier documents, the description of the speeches made at the opening of the Paris-Le Havre railway in 1847, featured in The Illustrated London News, and The Select Committee on Railway Labourers, published by the British government in 1846.8 It should be noted, furthermore, Devey drew on Locke’s own memories, ideas and opinions of his career railway building in France, expressed in his inaugural speech as the incoming president of the Institution of Civil Engineers on 13 January, 1858.9 There is also much evidence to suggest that the information given to the Select Committee by the leading engineers and contractors of the day was an important source for both Devey and Helps in the writing of their respective biographies of Locke and Brassey. These works by Devey and Helps also include descriptions

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of both men’s characters based on personal accounts by those who knew them well. Helps clearly summed up some of Brassey’s maturing views and opinions on navvy labour and how best to manage it, sections in his biography neatly complementing observations made by Brassey in his On Work and Wages, which was published the very same year.10 Such biographies are obviously discursive constructs, where the image or trope of this new class of British/Englishman, the railway engineer or contractor, was created. Both Devey’s and Helps’ works clearly form part of a wider and very popular genre of British biography writing, that of the Lives of the Engineers. This was initiated by the famous Samuel Smiles, broadcaster of the allegedly Victorian value of self-help and improvement in texts such as The Life of George Stephenson, first published in 1857, and The Lives of the Engineers (1862). These presented new visions, not just of the lives of these men, but also of the British identity or character. In these the “British character” is often drawn in contrast to that of other nations such as, in this case, France. It was Samuel Smiles who led the way in writing this new form of biography, often based on interviews and research, which used the lives of engineers and other leading industrialists to exemplify the grand deeds of a new social strata in Victorian Britain. Such biographies were clearly influential, being a new and celebrated development in a very notable genre in British popular literature. For instance, Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers was reprinted five times within the first year of its publication, while many of his other biographical studies of British engineers, especially his works on George and Robert Stephenson, were published in translation throughout the world.11 Like Smiles’s biographies, however, the lives of Brassey and Locke were based on substantial research, containing clear references to stories and statements given in interviews by their subjects and others to the Select Committee. As a result, while clearly being discursive constructs, both Devey’s and Helps’s biographies contain strong elements of the subjects’ own voices. How did this new discursive construction of British engineers’ “lives” take place and help to redefine characterizations of both British and French national identity during the Victorian period? Theoretically, “Britishness” (or more often “Englishness” as there was often a privileging of English subjects, to the detriment of those whose origins were Scottish, Welsh or Irish), was redefined through the portrayal of these leading figures of British technological advancement as the heroes of a new age. This famous genre of writing, which celebrated the lives of technological innovations and pioneers, established new tropes of progress and modernity which contributed to a redefinition of the British national character. While

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this redefinition cannot always be directly seen in this chapter about the relationship between British engineers, contractors, navvies and the French during the construction of these early railways in France, it is implicit in the description of this relationship and clearly informs the narration of it. However, as these biographies also contain clear references to statements given in interviews by Brassey and Locke and others to the Select Committee, these historical sources also record something of the reality of these men’s own prejudices about, and responses to, contact with the French, and indeed, workers and members of the public of other nationalities. As a result, this new vision of British/English national identity was further reinforced through these men’s own perceptions of “foreigners” as being different, as the “other” or “others”. Of course, many of these contrasting visions of British and French identity, along with views of other nationalities and races evident in writings on Victorian engineers, drew on taxonomies of race that which being developed in contemporary British society. While the “science of race” was hotly debated and somewhat controversial, there was a strong and persistent argument that—not only was there a hierarchy of races, with some, notably white “Anglo-Saxons”, enjoying an allegedly natural superiority—but that the nature of the races was dependent upon their “nation”, and the land or region from which they originated.12 However, that did not mean that a people were destined to remain solely in their homeland: the public culture of race, that while it took many different forms, presented British overseas expansion as “the expression of an inevitable national and racial urge.”13 In addition, as Michael Adas has so convincingly pointed out in Machines as the Measures of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (1989), there was a strongly-held assumption on the part of Westerners that they had a monopoly on scientific and technological knowledge, and that this gave them the right to exercise a natural dominance over other races.14 Clearly, identity—whether it be that of nation/state, or of the individual, or, as here, of race—is not fixed, but instead both fluid and highly contextual. It is also referential, existing only in contrast with the identity of another state, racial group, or individual. Indeed, there was also a “forthright binary of civilized-savagery” imagined by the British in the relationship between themselves and those they saw as naturally subordinate.15 These are the imagined “other” or “others”. In the words of Franke Wilmer, exploring the issue of identity in the Balkans of the 1990s and using many theoreticians’ works on the self and identity, identity is “‘bounded”, as national or racial identity is constantly being defined and redefined by encounters with “the other/s”.16 Such encounters may consist

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of either direct or indirect contact, or both. Written descriptions, images and objects produced about or by “the other/s” can be as important in creating this sense of a redefined national or racial identity as direct encounters with other ethnicities. If the groups or races being encountered are seen to be inferior, this supports and strengthens a sense of the self and national identity. However, encounters can be threatening and dangerous, especially if “the other/s” are considered to be strong and dominant when compared with the self or one’s own national identity. Clearly, this is of key importance in analyzing the responses of both the railway engineers or contractors, and their biographers, to the French, while these British men were building some of the early French railways. However, more recent work on the role of “the other” in constructing British identity has concluded that “internal others”, those who were perceived as different and challenging within Britain itself, played a similar role in defining “Britishness” or “Englishness”. In an essay entitled “A Homogenous Society? British Internal Others, 1880 to the present”, Laura Tabili focuses on this phenomenon.17 It should be noted that, in nineteenth-century British writings on railway building, one “internal other” was often the railway navvy, a figure with whom such men as Locke and Brassey worked daily. Often perceived as the “invading” Irish or “Scotch” (sic) and, additionally, as dangerous Roman Catholics (even when the particular navvies were neither Irish nor Catholic), the navvy was seen as a destroyer of the English countryside, and with their drunken “randys”, of English society too. A series of tropes concerning the railway navvy was established in Britain from the commencement of British railway construction in the 1830s. However, as will be seen in this chapter, they were transferred and transformed when the navvies from England moved to France to work on the early railways there.

British Railwaymen in France: Incomprehensions Having considered these more theoretical and methodological issues this chapter will now explore how these discourses helped to construct both the emerging identities of British railwaymen, engineers, contractors, and navvies, and their own visions of their French counterparts, the French government and French and Continental labour. In addition, the character and standing of the “English” railway navvy—as he was now dubbed in the works by Devey and Helps, irrespective of whence he came in the British Isles —was apparently utterly transformed as he moved from Britain to France. At home, he was the dissipated, rough-living drunkard. In France, while still an untamed force, the “English” navvy, according to

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Locke, carried out “the greatest amount of labour”, using “tools that modern art had suggested, and which none but the most expert and robust could wield”.18 There is also a further twist in the tale for, as time went on, these British engineers and contractors came to appreciate some aspects of the French, their government, and the character and habits of their workforce.

Initial Incomprehensions of the French State and her Engineers Initial incomprehensions of the French state and her engineers are all too evident in Devey’s Life of Joseph Locke. Here, Locke and Brassey are depicted as drawn into constructing these early lines in France because of the desperation of the French and their government. In highly melodramatic mode, Devey records that: … one day a travel-stained, but courtly bearing man [named Charles Lafitte], the chief of an eminent banking firm in Paris, arrived. He spoke English with a slight French accent and talked to them of fields in which they might realize all the gold visions which the fairy suggested to Alladin [sic].19

According to Devey, Lafitte had been compelled to make his journey because of the: desperate predicament the railway interest lay in his own country … through the dearth of capital, the mistrust of the inhabitants, the weakness of the spirit of association, the blunders of the engineers and the charlatanism of speculators.20

In a similar way, the French government was seen as being too centralized and interventionist regarding the planning and building of their early railway lines. In Devey’s view, this stymied free enterprise and entrepreneurial ingenuity, such as that shown by Locke. Devey’s text does go on to mention that the French government had prompted this visit from Lafitte, and that it had promised a loan of fourteen million francs, a total of nearly a quarter of the capital cost of the proposed railway. Indeed, plans had already been “carefully prepared” by “some intelligent French engineers” for the line.21 But Devey then went on to infer that the French, especially their investors and capitalists, were just too cautious to create a railway system. He argued that “France had failed to apply the new power [of the railway] upon any grand scale”.22

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Devey’s biography contrasts this vision of alleged French intransigence regarding the construction of their own railways with English decisive action, even assault, in this field. English surveyors have the “invading propensities of the Anglo-Saxons.” Here were three Englishmen “mapping out the Gallic soil, coolly taking stock of one of the main arteries of its commerce … forcing their ways into private bureaux, turning over their ledgers, making inventories of its towns,… [right] up to the walls of the French capital”, without any form of response, let alone resistance, from the French. In effect, the British surveyors were carrying out commercial espionage, with the “prying inspectors” of the South-Western Railway Company, estimating the future profits of the proposed railway route.23 Devey speculated that if a similar French “invasion force” had gone to Britain, “a host of susceptibilities and strange jealousies would have been roused….[These French] surveyors having hurriedly packed up their theodolites and inventories, would have been glad to be take themselves with unbruised bones out of the country.” Revealingly, the biographer of Locke even records that the two representatives from the South-Western Company, Mr Chaplin and Mr Reed “jocularly told the French proprietors that they had come to cut their throats.”24

Initial Incomprehensions of French Manual Labourers and the Transformation of British Navvies Devey’s construct of Locke’s and his colleagues’ work in surveying and constructing these early railways in France was one of commercial invasion, chauvinism, and hubris. In Devey’s and Helps’s view, what were these two famous men’s attitudes towards non-English labour on railway construction sites in France? In the biographers’ coverage of their subjects’ opinions on this topic, we can see further development of the hierarchical construct of labour and race. One common theme which both Devey and Helps develop is the initial, vocal opinion of both Locke and Brassey concerning the perceived inadequacy of the French workers, and, indeed, the wider Continental labour force. Once again, the “other” was measured against the perceived greater effectiveness of the “English”, in this case, the navvy. Clearly, these were highly chauvinistic ideas which drew on existing British racial prejudices. But those established concepts were eventually complicated by both Brassey’s and Locke’s own experiences, especially their encounters with the “others”. In this case, French “Others” were seen to be even more strange than the navvies whom they had met at home. There, British railway navvies were characterized as a “foreign” invasion force of Irish or Scottish workers.

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Once in France, and serving “English” engineers, the navvies from these very same places became “English”. While they may still not have been paragons of virtue, the British navvies were now seen as industrious, tough workmen, fast and effective in building British railways abroad. Devey recorded that “The only thing about which Mr Locke expressed any doubt … was the value of French labour. He had never employed French workmen”.25 Devey and Helps, and allegedly Locke and Brassey, had a simple and straightforward reason for this policy: not only were the French unseasoned in modern labour and railway building, but French contractors and their workforces demanded “prices nearly double which were asked by the Englishmen … and could not do half the work”.26 Devey has Locke accounting for this difference in work capacity between the French and the “English” navvy in three key ways. First of all, those navvies brought over from England were habituated to such heavy work; secondly, their diet was far more robust than that of their French and other Continental counterparts, making them stronger and more enduring in their labours as a result; finally, the French and Continental method of work was peasant-like and untouched by modern, improving technologies. Devey makes Locke comment that “A piece of coarse bread and an apple or pear, which then formed the ordinary meal of a French labourer, could not be set up against the navvies’ beef and bacon”.27 Similarly, Locke apparently believed that discarding “the wooden shovels and basket-sized barrows of the Frenchmen”, and using “the tools which modern art has suggested, and which none but the most expert and robust could wield” would transform French work practices into modern and superior “English” type of labour. There was hope that the French themselves would realize the wisdom of adopting these two changes: Devey noted that, in Joseph Locke’s address to the Institution of Civil Engineers in Britain when he became their President, he had commented that he often “heard the exclamation of the French loungers around a gang of navvies, ‘Mon Dieu, ces Anglais, comme ils travaillent!’”.28 In his biography of Thomas Brassey, Helps suggests that Brassey held similar views to those of Locke on the French and Continental labourers: he, too, criticized their initially limited capacity for hard work and their use of poorly developed, “peasant-like” tools. According to Helps, Brassey and his “bands of English workmen [were] pioneers in the art of railway-making”, and presumably had much to teach their European counterparts.29 Even after the habits of railway work had been established amongst French workers, “English” labourers were still seen as superior in their knowledge and management of railway construction. Helps suggests that many French labourers would not enter mining or tunneling operations

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unless the coordinator of the work was “English”. Continental labourers, according to Helps’s account of Brassey’s views, “used tools… mostly of a similar nature to those of the French”: these are described as being “only fly-tools”, flimsy, ill-suited to the task to which they were allocated, and certainly not of the advanced form the British employed.30 The use of tools and the organization of the labour of excavation became an indicator of the relative levels of human development in commentaries upon peoples of different races with the British Empire. This was the case not just for this immediate time period, but for many years after. Such an “evolutionary” view of labour as an index of human advancement can be seen not just in such writings on early railway development in Europe, but that on rail construction in India and Africa for well into the twentieth century. Employment that engaged such “lesser” peoples with more advanced technologies of work was seen to have automatic and immediate improving results for them. For instance, Sir Frederic Shelford, head of one of the leading British civil engineering firms engaged in railway and other forms of major construction in East Africa, argued that: The education of the native in the practical arts and crafts is a most important effect of the introduction of the iron horse, although railways share this influence with mining operations and other industries ... The native if left to himself will aspire to nothing but the simple husbandry of his father. But when railway construction is begun he is called upon to assist in surveying, clearing the forest, excavation of cuttings, blasting of cuttings in rock, building embankments etc erection of bridges, stationbuildings, workshops, telegraphs, laying of permanent way for which must educate him and advance him in the scale of civilisation.31

Numerous and similar examples of this British/Western construction of technological processes can be seen in many different narratives, including the popular illustrated press such as The Illustrated London News and The Graphic.32 The notion that the tool and its effective (or ineffective) use denoted the relative ability and intelligence of each race entered popular culture, becoming both prevalent and persistent. For instance a postcard of the 1910s, part of “The East and West Series” entitled “How Does Your Garden Grow?” compares the Indian “mali”, with his wooden spade and rough wicker basket, with the efficient British gardener.33 The mali’s basket and spade seem to fit the description of the “peasant”, pre-modern “fly-tools” described by Helps (and by inference, Brassey) as in use by French labourers during the early days of railway construction. Within this discourse on the Continental labourers, Helps shows Brassey constructing a national/racial hierarchy, one which is based not

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just on the dietary habits of each race, but on the climate and the terrain of their native land too. Such views were certainly those of Brassey himself, appearing in his On Work and Wages, published posthumously the same year as the first edition of Helps’s biography. The foreword by Helps states that Brassey supplied him with his unpublished notes on this subject. In On Work and Wages, Brassey advanced an argument that set British labour above its Continental counterpart in terms of intelligence and ability. Quoting the experience of James Kitson, junior, of Leeds, the son of James Kitson of the locomotive manufacturing company and himself a leading iron and steel manufacturer, Brassey notes that when Kitson employed French and Belgian men in his factory during a strike of his usual workforce he found them to be “scarcely as intelligent as our own.”34 In many ways, therefore, Brassey’s views represent, and intersect with, contemporary ideas of race and identity, and in particular, how national environment shaped and formed national character.35 Helps, for instances, tells us that Brassey argued that “The Piedmontese were found to be very good hands … He [the Piedmontese man] is hard and vigorous and a stout mountaineer, not often tipsy or riotous.”36 Similarly, Brassey apparently opined that the Neapolitans were frugal of diet, and as a result, weak, unable, or unwilling to carry out heavy work. Worse still, they tended to bring their entire family to the railway works, encumbering English contractors with further responsibilities and added dangers.37 It is interesting to note at this point that, in being compared with “the other/s”, the navvy from the British Isles underwent an interesting transformation. Rough, ready, drunk and still very disorderly, the British navvies were described by both Locke and Devey as “a formidable invasion … marked by the peculiarity of their dress, by their uncouth size, habits and manners….and so a contrast with the peasantry of that country.”38 But crossing the Channel appeared to have transformed the home country navvy. He was no longer a “peasant” from the more questionable Celtic regions of the British Isles, but increasingly the “English” (Anglo-Saxon) navvy, marked by his colossal appetite for hard work and his role as a member of a modernized labour force.

From Incomprehensions to Comprehension Despite these initial criticisms of the French, their government and their labour force, both the biographers of Locke and Brassey soon had to concede that there were some advantages to French, and indeed, Continental European ways. Locke was later to say that the French government, including the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, approached railway building

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with an exemplary zeal to remove all obstacles in his path. Indeed, this had been done with “fatherly care”.39 This was a very different attitude to that expressed by Locke at the opening of the Rouen-Paris railway. The Corps des Ponts et Chaussées not only strictly oversaw the railway works, but it also ensured that this project was carried out in an efficient and organised manner. Another advantage which Locke found in the French government system was that workers, or their families, were automatically compensated in the event of injury or death. This was far from being the case in Britain until much later in the nineteenth century. Individuals such as Brunel and Edwin Chadwick had complained to the Select Committee on Railway Labour in 1846 that such rules as were implemented by the French authorities, if enforced in Britain, would have resulted in railway contractors becoming liable for all accidents sustained by workers, including those caused by their employees’ own negligence or incompetence.40 The experience of these English engineers and contractors in France during the 1840s did prompt much debate at home: Brassey certainly conceded that the French system would not only have be a much fairer way of treating the navvy and his family in the event of any accident, but would probably promote better relationships between the workforce and the contractor. French government intervention was also useful in that the gendarmerie did much to enforce law and order amongst railway builders; this included having gendarmes on duty every time the navvies received their pay. In Britain this was not the case: pay day for railway navvies often resulted in great drunkenness and disorder. Helps also shows Brassey coming to new conclusions concerning French and Continental workers. In the biography, Brassey is to be found arguing that, after being employed on the railway for some time, the work and paid employment transformed French workers’ habits and value systems. From being a “backward peasantry”, the French became a hardworking labour force. Indeed, once experienced in this new form of work, the French labourers began to rival the German navvies (who were seen to share the Teutonic qualities of diligence and perseverance with their “English” counterparts) with their “powers of endurance”.41 Most of the Continental races were also seen to be far less difficult and rebellious than their “English” counterparts. Brassey was also heartened by a petition which he received from Belgian railway navvies, asking to be paid monthly rather than fortnightly, as was routine for “English” navvies. On hearing this request, Brassey asked if the Belgians wanted a small advance to provide for their living expenses until the end of the month, an offer which was refused by the workers who said they could manage without such an arrangement. The reason for the request was to facilitate the

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sending of money home to their families, which was more easily achieved by monthly payment of wages. These thrifty and (not to mention) sober habits of the Belgian men stood in stark contrast to the habits of the “English” navvy as he was usually portrayed.42

Conclusion Both Devey’s The Life of Joseph Locke (1862), and Sir Arthur Helps’s Life and Times of Thomas Brassey, first published some ten years later, record the initial, and often very deep-seated and highly prejudiced incomprehensions of the French, their government, people, and labourers, that these commentators held during these early days of railway construction on the European continent. Equally, both biographers also reveal the development of an increased comprehension of the French, and of other Europeans and their ways, as the work on the Rouen-Le Havre line progressed. In apparently observing, but also interpreting, the different methods of approach to construction work, these biographers were arguably using a theoretical association between a nation’s geography and terrain with its people’s social habits, which was generally held by British society. In addition, Devey and Helps (and most probably their subjects Locke and Brassey) were also engaging in the ongoing social construction of a hierarchy of races which was developing in contemporary Western theoretical literature. They may only have been commentating on one small aspect of that emerging hierarchy of race to which many Britons increasingly subscribed, but with their views on how the rough “Irish” and “Scottish” navvy was transformed into a hard-working “English” worker, far superior to their European counterpart once he had crossed the Channel, they were both constructing and perpetuating the ideology in which that hierarchy was defined. Clearly, these incomprehensions and eventual comprehensions, this encounter with “the other” (whether it was the navvy of the British Isles, the “internal other”, or the new “other” of the European continent, recast) remade, but also often reinforced, this British construct of race.

Bibliography Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, New York State: Cornell University Press, 1989. Anonymous. “The Death of Dr Samuel Smiles”. The Times, 18 May, 1904.

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—. “Joseph Locke’s Presidential Speech to the Institution of Civil Engineers”. Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 17 (1858): 128-153. —. “Opening of the Rouen and Havre Railway”. The Illustrated London News, 27 March, 1847. Brassey, Thomas. On Work and Wages. London: Spottiswoode and Co., 1872. Brooke, David. “Thomas Brassey (1805-1870)” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H.C.G Matthew and Brian Harrison, 7: 386-388. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Chakravarty, Gautuam. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Devey, Joseph. The Life of Joseph Locke, Civil Engineer, MP, FRS, Etc. Etc. London: Richard Bentley Ltd, 1862. Drummond, Di. “British Imperial Narratives of Progress through Rail Transportation and Indigenous Peoples’ Responses in India and Africa, 1850-1939: Questioning Railway Transportation as a Lifeline of Development”. Zeitschrift fur Weltgeschichte: Interdisziplinare Perspektiven 12, no. 2 (Autumn 2011): 107-140. —. “Selling a Mechanized Imperial Culture: The Production of British Popular Cultural Perceptions of the Role of the Steam Railway as a Civilizing Force in India and Africa, 1853-1901 in the Illustrations of The Illustrated London News and The Graphic”. Paper presented at paper given at Selling Culture? Popular Cultural Identities in the Victorian Periodical Press Conference, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and the Association for Research in Popular Fictions, John Moores University, Liverpool, 20-21 November, 2010. Hall, Catherine. “The Nation Within and Without” in Defining the Victorian Nation: Race, Class and Gender and the Reform Act of 1867, edited by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall, 179233. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Helps, Arthur. Life and Labour of Sir Thomas Brassey. 11th ed. London: C. Whittingham and Co, 1888. Mathur, Saloni. India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Minutes of evidence from Edwin Chadwick. British Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on Railway Labour, Minutes of Evidence (1846), 161-170. Mitchell, Allan. The Great Train Race: Railways and the Franco-German Rivalry, 1815-1914, (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).

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Stepan, Nancy Leys. “Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship” in Cultures of Empire: A Reader—Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Catherine Hall, 61-86. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Tabili, Laura. “A Homogenous Society? British Internal Others, 1880 to the Present”, in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, edited by Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, 53-75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Wilmer, Franke. The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War: Identity, Conflict and Violence in Former Yugoslavia. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Notes 1

“Opening of the Rouen and Havre Railway”, The Illustrated London News, 27 March, 1847, 205. 2 Ibid. 3 Joseph Devey, The Life of Joseph Locke, Civil Engineer, MP, FRS, Etc. Etc (London: Richard Bentley Ltd, 1862). 4 David Brooke, “Thomas Brassey (1805-1870)” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7: 386-388. In Brassey’s defence, Sir Arthur Helps in his Life and Labour of Sir Thomas Brassey, 11th ed. (London: C Whittingham and Co, 1888), 36-37, argues that the viaduct was constructed during atrocious weather and was “built according to the contract”, using lime mortar. Helps records that Brassey was “upset by this untoward event”, but that Brassey’s partner, “Mr Mackenzie met the difficulty most manfully. ‘The first thing to do’, as they said, ‘is to build it up again.’”. 5 Devey, Locke, 169. 6 See Allan Mitchell, The Great Train Race: Railways and the Franco-German Rivalry, 1815-1914, (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 3-36. 7 Catherine Hall, “The Nation Within and Without” in Defining the Victorian Nation: Race, Class and Gender and the Reform Act of 1867, ed. Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2000), 180. 8 Ibid., 180. 9 “Joseph Locke’s Presidential Speech to the Institution of Civil Engineers”, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 17 (1858): 128153. 10 Thomas Brassey, On Work and Wages (London: Spottiswoode and Co., 1872). 11 “The Death of Dr Samuel Smiles”, The Times, 18 May, 1904, 7. 12 Hall, “The Nation”, 180. 13 Gautuam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1.

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Hall, “The Nation”, 185. Here Hall cites Thomas Carlyle’s arguments regarding race, for instance. Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed., (London: Henry Renshaw, 1862), 192 identified a similar argument for this connection between race, supposed “racial characteristics”, and region or place. 15 Hall, “The Nation”, 133. 16 Franke Wilmer, The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War: Identity, Conflict and Violence in Former Yugoslavia (New York: Routledge, 2002), 69. 17 Laura Tabili, “A Homogenous Society? British Internal Others, 1880 to the Present”, in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 53-75. 18 Devey, Locke, 167. Here Devey is citing Locke’s speech to the Institute of Civil Engineers again (see endnote 5). 19 Ibid., 157. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 159. 22 Ibid., 155. 23 Ibid., 161. 24 Ibid., 160-1. 25 Ibid., 164. 26 Ibid., 167. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 166. 29 Helps, Brassey, 46. 30 Ibid., 88. 31 Quoted in Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, New York State: Cornell University Press, 1989), 230. 32 For more on this topic, see, Di Drummond, “Selling a Mechanized Imperial Culture: The Production of British Popular Cultural Perceptions of the Role of the Steam Railway as a Civilizing Force in India and Africa, 1853-1901 in the Illustrations of The Illustrated London News and The Graphic” (paper presented at Selling Culture? Popular Cultural Identities in the Victorian Periodical Press Conference, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and the Association for Research in Popular Fictions, John Moores University, Liverpool, 20-21 November, 2010 and “British Imperial Narratives of Progress through Rail Transportation and Indigenous Peoples’ Responses in India and Africa, 1850-1939: Questioning Railway Transportation as a Lifeline of Development’’, Zeitschrift fur Weltgeschichte: Interdisziplinare Perspektiven 12, no. 2 (Autumn 2011): 107-140. 33 Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 123. 34 Brassey, On Work and Wages, 112. Here Brassey was citing evidence given by James Kitson Junior on 11 June 1868 to the Select Committee on Scientific Instruction (1867-8), 249.

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35 See endnote 14 above and Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship” in Cultures of Empire: A Reader—Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Catherine Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 61-86. 36 Helps, Brassey, 87. 37 Ibid. 38 Devey, Locke, 165. 39 Ibid., 163. 40 See British Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on Railway Labour, Minutes of Evidence (1846), 161-170. Minutes of evidence from Edwin Chadwick. 41 Devey, Locke, 89. 42 Helps, Brassey, 42.

CHAPTER FOUR CONTINUITY IN THE LAND: THE FRENCH PEASANT IN ENGLISH EYES KAREN SAYER

The peasant Proprietor of France, as he is pictured by those who have never seen him, is a wonderful creation of the human fancy. —“The French Peasant Farmer”, Ipswich Journal, 14 January, 1882.

Introduction Images of rural life, and of peasants in particular, saturated both Britain and France in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As Caroline Brettell has argued in her account of travel writing on the Mediterranean peasant, “it was hardly possible not to have an opinion about the peasantry … [as] this was a century … when city and country confronted one another head-on.”1 In Britain, art, travel-writing, journalism, and agricultural commentary reveal the French peasant as representative, representative that is of English anxieties—about the “Irish Question”, about the flight from the land, about the agricultural depression, and about women’s work in agriculture. At the same time, a continuity in the land was established, which made the French peasant representative (despite exceptions) of an essentialized French national identity, so that the French peasant came to embody the land—a land that was cultured and historic in the English, as well as the French, eye. The dialogue between British and French artists was well-established and ongoing, and their audiences understood that dialogue. Understandings about the British as well as the French countryside were documented through it, although the French countryside was vested with unique characteristics. Arthur Young, agricultural reformer and dedicated “improver”,2 cast a long shadow, of course. His Travels in France were edited and republished in 1889 by Matilda Betham-Edwards, an author and a farmer who wrote extensively on the value of independent farming

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life and the dignity of peasant farming in France.3 Young’s ideas about métayage—a system of “halving”, whereby the landowner and producer shared the produce, which had grown up in France after the Middle Ages and persisted in some areas until the twentieth century, but which had been in decline since the late eighteenth century—were addressed in the British agricultural press as new models of proprietorship came up for discussion in Britain. In fact, a large number of articles on agricultural practices in France, farming, and peasant proprietorship can be found in the British agricultural and related press, and in official papers throughout the nineteenth century.4 Although nineteenth-century British writers on agriculture had an established prejudice against the small farmer as being disinclined to innovate5 and some discussions of French agriculture reflect the prejudices of the “improving” agriculturalist and economist, many of these accounts considered the French system on its own merits and found much to praise.6 France was also recognised as a diverse country in these and other texts, and Brittany and Normandy in particular were conspicuously represented as places apart. As the Ipswich Journal put it when reviewing Frances Parthenope Verney’s essay “Peasant Proprietors in France”, in the January 1882 issue of the Contemporary Review: Normandy, after centuries of French rule, is even yet hardly French; and the same may be said of Brittany … and it is in these that the system of peasant ownership and petite culture seems to have found its most complete development.7

Farmers, Small Owners, Peasants, Métayers, and Proprietors There were distinct differences in the social, political, and economic contexts of French and British agriculture. For instance, although bodies such as the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) received no state support other than simple patronage in the United Kingdom—until 1910, when three million pounds was invested in agricultural research and education—in France, the state promoted agricultural research throughout the nineteenth century (and provided the model for the development of agricultural research in the United States), through the establishment of agricultural schools from 1830.8 Moreover, the rate of decline of employment in agriculture was much slower in France than that in Britain. As a result, a much larger proportion of the population continued to work and live on the land in France, where they provided “for their own need”.9 Although in 1874 some 50% of the grain harvest was cut by mechanical reaper in Britain, in France even as late as 1882 only 6% was harvested

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this way, because there was a greater surplus of labour in France than in Britain. However, there were efforts to improve yields; hence fungicides were being used in France as early as the 1850s to protect vines.10 The key difference which constantly caught the eye of the British commentator, however, was that small-scale family or peasant farming remained, if not the rule, then certainly commonplace, throughout France. The peasant household supplied the labour, linked into wider kinship networks, with specialists organizing the selling of goods produced for the market. Men and women, Martine Segalen has shown, worked in complementary ways, often co-operatively, so that farm, farmyard, and field were interlinked.11 Indeed, it was commonplace for women to help to prepare the land and sew seed, so that at harvest and other times “the woman had a normal and continuous place in the fields”.12 This was often thrown up in stark contrast to the British experience, as was the very wide range of proprietorship, of method, and of production (which included, across France, cider and wine production, for instance, as well as arable, dairy, meat and poultry, fruit and vegetable production). However, British agriculturalists showed a keen interest in French farming and a sympathy for French farmers in crisis, for instance during the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, when James Howard, a manufacturer of agricultural implements and a leading agriculturalist, established the French Peasant Seed Fund. Supported by Daily News and leading lights such as James Caird, the organisation aimed to raise £50,00013 to spend on wheat seed, “barley, oats, potatoes, vetches and garden seeds”.14

Dialogue between British and French Art Reviews of their exhibitions demonstrate that many British artists depicted French subjects,15 and both French and British artists were influenced by, and schooled in, each other’s work.16 As Marcia Pointon has argued in respect of the Bonington circle, the “practice and status of landscape painting were well established in Paris” by the early nineteenth century, based on plein air media and a love of all things rural. The artists of the 1820s, she argues, “were able to profit from an already existing passion for tramping the countryside with sketching materials, a passion which had seized the youth of France around 1816.”17 By 1825, young British artists living in France had become immersed in a new artistic project that remained influential into the late nineteenth century. The “charms of Normandy … discovered by [these] artists in the early 1820s” remained particularly seductive.18 Paris continued as the centre of the artistic world, attracting British artists in training, yet—as most did not

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speak French, tended to stick together, and were attracted to the more middle-of-the road ateliers—it was only those students who struck out to Brittany and Normandy who adopted the more radical techniques.19 Travel to Brittany was facilitated by the coming of the railway from the 1870s, and led both to rapid modernisation and to a growth in tourism among those who sought picturesque costumes and traditions in decline. As Kenneth McConkey has suggested, the “rise in the Breton economy throughout these years had the important effect of creating a more opulent and self-confident peasantry than that in the other regions of France and there is evidence that the revival of interest in local customs and history was a consequence of this.”20 Indeed, as Herman Roodenberg argues, at this time, Europe-wide, artists would “discover” a remote region, establish colonies, paint, record and preserve its isolated and simple antiquity, only to be followed by guide-book authors, and then guide-book-bearing tourists, who would ultimately lament its rail-driven destruction.21 Such a process belonged to artists’, folklorists’, and tourists’ intersecting searches for authenticity and the picturesque, and was shaped by dominant notions of the “primitive”. A relatively open concept at this point, the discourse of the “primitive” centred on “the rustic and the archaic as the wished-for antithesis of an urbanizing and industrializing modern society.”22 This was a concept which drove demand for and commercial interest in the products of peasant society and imagery,23 and in Britain shaped public perceptions of the rural as both a site of nostalgia and of incivility, to the extent that even the native countryside might be seen as an alien landscape that necessitated repeated attempts at investigation, documentation, and exploration.24 French paintings were regularly exhibited in London from the 1850s and British artists were influenced by the idyllic and the aesthetic aspects of French work, even when painting local subjects. Rosa Bonheur’s canvases, for instance, were enormously popular and influential,25 and though, as Christiana Payne suggests, many British artists initially seem to have sought to maintain a foothold in the English tradition, it is possible to see an emergence of much greater social commentary and naturalism by the 1870s, and direct dialogue in technique in schools such as Newlyn and Glasgow. This peaked with artists such as Henry Herbert La Thangue, who trained in Paris and painted in Brittany, and George Clausen: both were inspired by the works of Jules Bastien-Lepage, such as Les Foins (1878). Once they had returned from France, La Thangue and Clausen established the New English Art Club in 1886, and, as Christopher Wood has argued, during the 1880s and 1890s Clausen’s work reflected a “strong French influence.”26 However, this was not always well-received at home;

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for Clausen it resulted in comments by some British reviewers that he had ‘”seen nothing but the sordid and mean”’.27 As Payne suggests, the “public appreciated ‘truth to nature’, yet there were certain unpalatable truths about rural life that they did not want to be told”.28 As a result, Clausen for one turned away from Bastien-Lepage and towards Millet, producing for example such works as The Return from the Fields (Boy and Man) (1882), which Wood has described as “one of the most successful of all translations of the Millet style into an English idiom”;29 then later in the 1890s, he took inspiration from the Impressionists, as pieces such as The Mowers (1891) and The Boy and the Man (1908) demonstrate.30 That is, he turned away from too literal a depiction of rural life grounded in social realism, to a more anonymous form of representation within which the figure of the worker became a monumental aspect of Nature, before moving on to an aesthetic exploration of the fluid movements of figures and of light.31 Indeed, ultimately Clausen’s work became almost entirely preoccupied with light, though his figures, as Wood observes, remained essentially heroic32 and a piece such as The Allotment Garden (1899) still refers very powerfully to Millet’s Gleaners (1857) and Angelus (1859)— in Clausen’s case, with work standing in for prayer. This highlights the tension in any representation of the “primitive”, in any image of the European peasantry and rural life: is the peasant to be seen as a noble, or a bestial, savage? Nevertheless, the interest in these subjects and techniques continued, indeed intensified, up to the First World War. It is worth bearing in mind here that, in Britain, both public galleries and private collectors in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Birmingham, as well as in the metropolis, reacted strongly to what they liked or disliked.33 Those who enjoyed images of rural life were drawn to them whether their subjects were of British or French (or indeed Spanish or Italian) origin. The sale of Mr. H. Thompson’s art collection, reported in the Liverpool Mercury in 1881, for example, reveals a mix of British and French and other landscapes, and genre pieces including: Boulogne Harbour—Sunset by J. McPherson, (sold for £4.4s); Normandy Fisher Girl by G. G. Kilburne (17 ½ guineas); French Peasant Girls, Varengeville, by Alice Havers (37 guineas); Convolvulus, by Helen Allingham (12 ½ guineas); Feeding Chickens—Springtime by Townley Green (19 guineas), and Neapolitan Peasants by an unknown artist (4 ½ guineas).34 As Dianne Sachko Macleod has stated, collectors in Liverpool were well-known to London artists and dealers, and many exhibitions and collectors bought in French artists, although, as she demonstrates, a positive reception was not always guaranteed.35

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At the same time, “artistic” tourism emerged in a form of travel writing dedicated to visiting the key sites associated with favourite artists such as Millet, described in The Pall Mall Gazette as “The Peasant-Painter of France”.36 Similarly, Matilda Betham-Edwards provides a detailed account of her visit to Rosa Bonheur, shortly before Bonheur’s death in 1899, in Anglo-French Reminiscences, 1875-1899 (1900). As Amy Wyngaard has argued, by this point, the rural was widely treated nostalgically, as essentially fragile, in French literature and art,37 while French folklorists sought out and catalogued local objects, traditions, and dress. A British writer such as Betham-Edwards was equally aware of and influenced by this and it is striking that she and Bonheur talk about whether or not Betham-Edwards has seen ‘“the primitive method of threshing corn by horses”’. ‘“Yes,’” Betham-Edwards replies “‘I had once come upon the Biblical scene in the department of the Aveyron, and not so many years before’. This interested her,” Betham-Edwards continues, ‘“But the custom is fast dying out everywhere,’ [Bonheur] replied, with a touch of regret. Farming in France and elsewhere is indeed fast losing all poetry. Just as future generations must refer to Bret Harte for all life and language of the Siovas, so will old-world French husbandry survive only on canvases of a Bonheur or a Millet.”38 Caroline Ford has suggested, by the mid-nineteenth century in France nationalist and aesthetic interests had led to a conjunction between a growing interest in French geography and the attempt to preserve the landscape.39 As one critic, referring to French landscape painting around Paris in the 1860s, observed: through landscape, art becomes national … it takes possession of France, of the ground, of the air, of the sky, of the French landscape. This land that has borne us, the air that we breathe, this harmonious and sweet whole that constitutes the face of the mother country, we carry it in our soul.40

What was valued about these landscapes was not that they were representations of Romantic wild or untamed nature, as might be seen in American literature and art of the same period, for instance, but that they were peopled, lived-in environments: there were villages, woodlands, well-tilled fields, and peasants at work. In other words, that they represented cultivation, or as Ford puts it, “an undissassociated mix of nature and culture”.41 These interests led to the creation of societies in France that aimed to conserve the countryside and create so-called “natural sites”.42 The closely-woven relationship that formed in the late eighteenth century in Britain, and indeed America, between the contesting constructions

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of landscape and nature and the practices of agriculture, to be found in Romantic, picturesque and rustic art, has been well-established.43 And, as in Britain, where, Ann Bermingham has observed, there was a focus on agricultural revolution and production within landscape painting, which through the picturesque sought to interpret and justify capital’s use of nature,44 in France the focus on cultivation dates from about the time of the French Revolution.45 Indeed, just as we can see the image of the (always happy and content) peasant in Britain shifting from idleness to industry as artistic practices shifted, so that increased realism still allowed older artistic practices to be maintained,46 the cultural origins of the “French Peasant”, Ford suggests, could already be seen emerging in France during the Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, Wyngaard argues, the French peasant (replacing the shepherd of rococo pastoralism) became a carrier of the values of virtue and merit, through his simplicity, industry, and honesty.47 This image was partially indebted to Rousseau’s noble savage: the French peasant was perceived as a primitive figure, closer to nature and therefore more innocent, embodying an essential goodness in opposition to the artifice and corruption of the civilised (urban) man. However, as Caroline Brettell has observed with reference to the representation of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese peasants by British and French travel writers, the noble savage also stood in direct opposition to the peasant as brutalised and even animalistic.48 In each instance, the peasant was a carrier of meaning, but as an essentially ignoble subject, it was only as naturalism spread, Brettell argues elsewhere, that the northern peasant became a suitable subject, and the realities, as they were seen, of peasant life became fit for art. Therefore, it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that folklorists and those who followed them began to treat the peasant heroically, drawing a strong connection between rural populations and the environment as a unified national theme.49 Millet was a favourite in Britain, partly because, like Bonheur, he avowedly sought to incorporate elements of the real within his work. However, as Linda Nochlin has argued, the works of artists such as Millet are nonetheless “historically conditioned mythic structures, replete with messages about sex, about nature, about work, about the role of women, about the nature of history. [These types of work] in short, are documents of nineteenth-century ideology itself, mediated through the vision of particular artists.”50 The same was true of British authors, such as Betham-Edwards, who focused on rural life: the peasant in effect acted as a screen onto which their own values and the concerns of their (often urban, certainly cultured) audience could be safely projected. This followed a well-worn path; the Irish Question for example, was often mapped onto

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the French peasantry and issues relating to small-scale French agriculture.51 As an author, Matilda Betham-Edwards sat at the boundary between travel writing and agricultural commentary, and as a result, her work is constantly torn between regret for the traditions of rural communities and the celebration of modernity. On seeing steam engines and the latest agricultural equipment on a farm at Vitry-en-Artois, near Arras, she observed: We are thus brought face-to-face with the agriculture of the future, ancient methods and appliances being supplanted one by one, manual labour reduced to the minimum, the cultivation of the soil become purely mechanical. The idyllic element vanishes from rural life and all savours of Chicago!52

In her “agricultural round in Picardy and French Flanders, regions so near to home, yet so unfamiliar to most of us!”, she observes “small patches” of land farmed by peasants “dovetailing” with the much larger concerns which she visits.53 This tension perhaps becomes clearest in the reception of her new edition of Arthur Young’s Travels in France (1889) by the RASE, which criticised it for missing out important agricultural detail, but valued it for her introduction referring to her own travels through France over fifteen years.54 Betham-Edwards’s farming experience makes her writing on the French peasant more sympathetic and more realistic than most. She seeks to understand his methods—and she includes a robust defence of metayage,55 attacked by Young, and also more recently by Lady Verney56—but she nonetheless refers to continuity with the Celtic past in Burgundy, where Young was on the threshold of the little Celtic kingdom of the Morvan, where village communism … remained in force till our own day, and where the stalwart husbandman still throws over his shoulder the Gallic sagum, or short cloak, worn by the contemporaries of Vercingetorix.57

As James Lehning argued in Peasant and French, the peasant was represented ambiguously in France by urban authors who sought to understand themselves, and therefore the identity of the “French”, by describing a culture which was alien to them: a culture, as they perceived it, that bore a history which revolved “around the process by which they lost their Burundian, Breton, Norman, Provencal, or other (peasant) identities and were made French.”58 At the same time, the peasant and the countryside were “timeless”: as Lehning puts it, “any history would cause [them] to lose [their] principal characteristics.”59

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What I would argue is that these representations of the French peasant, by the French, bled into British texts and art via naturalism and folkloric literature, especially into the writing of those, such as Betham-Edwards, who were interested in representing the French peasant “accurately”, that is, as the French would like to see him. The travel writer Katherine Macquoid, for instance, in detailing the history of Brittany, encompasses the Romans and Druids in order to provide a context for travellers which would allow them to understand the “true Breton” (who even by the 1880s was not quite “French”):60 With his long tangled hair, his trunk hose, his gaily embroidered garments, his immense black hat, and his fierce black eyes gleaming beneath it. … the most picturesque-looking creature possible, [with] a certain grand dignified manner at times which contrasts as strangely with the dirt and squalor in which he lives as the handsome old carved beds and presses and chests in his house contrast with the uneven mud floors, and the proximity of the cow-house and the pigs and poultry, which mingle with the children on the dirty ground.61

Indeed, before this she explains that it is hard to write “about Brittany, where perhaps one can say truthfully every barren plain bears, either visibly or beneath its brown soil, some mysterious token of an epoch before history began, and frequently also of one or other of the various invaders, who … yet left the ancient people much as they found them.”62 This is continuity in the land where soil and peasant are effectively one. Even in Henry Rew, an agricultural commentator who travelled through Normandy during the first decade of the twentieth century, we see a similar if more bucolic link between past and present when he says: We saw a farmer who was occupied in cutting his wheat, his wife tying after him, and the baby in a perambulator sleeping peacefully in the corner of the field … He told us that his course was (1) wheat, (2) oats, (3) beetroot or clover, …. There can be little doubt, it seems to me, that this system of farming is essentially a survival from the time of the occupation of Gaul by the Romans, who probably introduced the three-field course into France.63

And the economist Henry Higgs began his article on métayage with the observation that “even the traveller hurried along by a French express train can, see something of economic interest ... If he comes from England he will probably be struck ... by the intermixture of strips, eloquent, to the economic historian, of the open field system of the earliest times.”64 In this respect, those working with the genres of agricultural and economic

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writing contributed to the image of the French peasant just as much as folklorists and travel writers. Strikingly, when he later defends métayage, Higgs then argues that “there seems to be a clear balance of advantage in its favour, so far as small farms and small capitals are concerned”, because it seems to generate “more friendly social relations” and “might supply a bridge between the tenants of small holdings and a new class of yeoman in [Britain].”65 In other words, as a survival of the past, it offers a system which would enable British agriculture to revive/recover its lost yeomanry, and might even allow the British countryside to retain/retrieve at least some of its communal life, which is clearly the ideal for Higgs and many of his contemporaries. In the 1890s the loss of the supposed organic community was at the time frequently linked, along with agricultural depression, to rural depopulation, a cause of widespread concern.66 Here there was an underlying sense of regret, and an attempt to inoculate the present with the past in order to save it for the future, 67 but in this case it is the past of another country. In Macquoid’s Through Brittany, the characteristics of the peasant are delineated, their dress, physiognomy, bearing, living conditions, and property. This is typical of the anthropological character of the genre, and we can see Betham-Edwards approaching it at times, for instance, with her reference to “the Gallic sagum”. What is also apparent in Macquoid’s work, however, is a tension between distaste and pleasure in her discoveries. She is particularly pleased, like French writers, to detail local customs and superstitions, and the “almost idyllic charm that seems to hang about their lazy, happy, outdoor village life, with its merrymaking and dances, and the never-failing ballads and tales, or the weird music of the bagpipes…”68 Images like this, as Brettell argues, have to be understood as belonging to the expansion of folklore throughout northern Europe, a field that marked peasants out as survivals from the past, “the rural folk of Europe as remnants of the antique”.69 In order to maintain the timeless qualities of the French peasant, I would therefore suggest, it was only safe to refer to the very distant past, to distant antiquity. Typically costume, festivals and superstitions were described; fairs and fêtes in particular gave rise to images of bucolic bliss.70 On the negative side, however, we find peasant as beast, as implied by Macquoid’s text: living close to animals, he is often hard to distinguish from them. Lady Verney’s “Peasant Proprietors in France”, an essay setting out her strong views on landownership,71 typifies this focus when describing the “poverty and barbarism” of the French peasant, who chooses to spend his nights sleeping in the same housing as his cows, horse, and fowl.72 We can see the same theme emerging in more sympathetic form in the work of French and British artists, such as Debat-

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Ponsan or Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes, who often referred to the innate communication that seemed to exist between the peasant and his, or her, animals.73 Continuity with the land is expressed in these images through the peasants’ closeness to, and an essential sympathy with, unchanging animal nature.

Conclusion The meanings associated with the French peasant, ambiguous though they often were, were created in France but bled out into British representation, becoming contiguous with wider northern European interests in “primitive” folk culture. British authors and artists took up French myths about the French peasant, and detailed variations in language, costume and condition in the same way as French authors seeking to better understand French history and society. As a result, British travel writing, journalism, agricultural commentary, and art describing the French peasant added to the identity “French peasant” already created in France. But the French peasant as a carrier of values and meanings also had his own significance for the British—especially by the late nineteenth century, as concerns about the loss of their own peasant “stock”, as depopulation (the “flight from the land”) peaked. Folklorists catalogued antiquity both lost and lamented: the myth of French continuity in the land allowed British authors to explore their own fears about national disruption, loss, and decay.

Bibliography Anonymous. “The Cottage, by F. W. Watts”. The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 11, no. 52 (Jul., 1907): 226, 230-231. —. “The French Peasant Farmer”. Ipswich Journal, 14 January, 1882, issue 8017. —. “The French Peasant Farmers’ Seed Feed”. Daily News, 7 December, 1871. —. “Mdlle Rosa Bonheur’s ‘Horsefair’ and Mr W.P. Frith’s ‘Derby Day’”. Times, 27 April, 1865. —.“The Peasant Painter of France: A Visit to Millet’s Birthplace at Gruchy”. Pall Mall Gazette, 22 July, 1889. —. “Sale of Mr H. Thompson’s Art Collection”. The Liverpool Mercury, 3 November, 1881. —. “Society of Water-colour Painters”. The Morning Chronicle, 29 April, 1850.

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Barrell, John. The Dark Side of the Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Bear, W. E. “Our Agricultural Population”. The Economic Journal 4, no. 14 (Jun., 1894): 317-331. Bermingham, A. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Betham-Edwards, Matilda. Anglo-French Reminiscences 1875-1899. London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1900. —. In the Heart of the Vosges. London: Chapman and Hall, 1911. —. Travels in France by Arthur Young During the Years 1787, 1788, 1789. London: George Bell and Sons, 1889. Bourne, George. Lucy Bettesworth. London: Duckworth & Co., 1913. Brettell, Caroline B. “Nineteenth Century Travellers’ Acounts of the Mediterranean Peasant”. Ethnohistory 33, no. 2 (Spring, 1986): 159173. Brettell, R. R. and C. R. Painters and Peasants in the Nineteenth Century. Geneva: Albert Skira, 1983. Castelot, E. “Rural Dwellings in France”. The Economic Journal 5, no. 17 (Mar., 1895): 89-94. Clarke, John Algernon. “On Increasing our Home Production of Poultry”. Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 2nd ser., 2 (1866): 338-360. Daniels, S. Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1993. Ford, Caroline. “Landscape and Environment in French Historical and Geographical Thought: New Directions”. Review Essay, French Historical Studies, 24, no. 1 (Winter, 2001): 125-134. Fox, Caroline. Stanhope Forbes and the Newlyn School. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1994. Frere, P. H. “The Poultry of France”. Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 2nd ser., 2 (1866): 79-92. Goodman, David, Sori, Berardo, and Wilkinson, John, From Farming to Biotechnology: A Theory of Agro-Industrial Development. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Goodwin, George, rev. Brown, Jonathan. “Howard, James”, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 28: 387-88. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Grigg, David. The Dynamics of Agricultural Change: The Historical Experience. London: Hutchinson, 1982.

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Haigh, John D. “Verney (née Nightingale), Frances Parthenope (18191890)”, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 56: 339-400. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Higgs, Henry. “‘Metayage’ in Western France”. The Economic Journal 4, no. 13 (Mar. 1894): 1-13. Kolodny, A. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Lehning, James R. Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Longstaff, G. B. “Rural Depopulation”. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 56, no. 3: 380-442. Macleod, Dianne S. “Private and Public Patronage in Victorian Newcastle”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52 (1989): 188-208. Macquoid, Katherine S. Through Brittany. London: Chatto and Windus, c. 1877. McConkey, Kenneth. Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002. McConkey, Kenneth. Review of J. Campbell, Peintres Irlandis en Bretagne. Irish Arts Review Yearbook 17 (2001): 181-2. Mingay, G.E. “Young, Arthur (1741-1820)”, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60: 869-875. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Nochlin, Linda. Representing Women. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Payne, Christiana. Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780-1890. New Haven and London: Yale Centre for British Art, Yale University Press, 1994. Pell, Albert. “Arthur Young’s Travels in France”. Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England , 1st ser., 1 (1890): 202-204, 203. Pointon, Marcia. The Bonington Circle—English Watercolour and AngloFrench Landscape 1790-1855. Brighton: The Hendon Press, 1985. Preliminary Report from Her Majesty's Commissioners on Agriculture. 1881. Rew, Richard Henry. An Agricultural Faggot. London: P. S. King and Son, 1913.

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Roodenberg, Herman. “Making an Island in Time: Dutch Folklore Studies, Painting, Tourism, and Craniometry around 1900”. Journal of Folklore Research 39, no. 2/3 (May-Dec 2002): 173-200. The Royal Commission on Agriculture. Reports of the assistant commissioners. Southern district of England. Report by Mr. Little on Devon, Cornwall, Dorset and Somerset. 1882. Sales, R. English Literature in History 1750-1830, Pastoral and Politics. London: Hutchinson, 1983. Sayer, Karen. Women of the Fields: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth Century Rural Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Seebohm, F. “French Peasant Proprietorship Under the Open Field System of Husbandry”. The Economic Journal 1, no., 1 (Mar., 1891): 59-72. Segalen, Martine. Love and Power in the Peasant Family: rural France in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Sarah Matthews. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Thirsk, Joan . “Edwards, Matilda Barbara Betham (1836-1919)”, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison 17: 955-56. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Verney, Frances Parthenope. “Peasant Proprietors in France” (1882), cited in “The French Peasant Farmer”. The Ipswich Journal, 14 January, 1882, and Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 13 December, 1882. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. Wood, Christopher. Paradise Lost: Paintings of English Country Life and Landscape 1830-1914. London: Grange Books, 1988. Wyngaard, Amy S. From Savage to Citizen: The Invention of the Peasant in the French Enlightenment. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004.

Notes 1

Caroline B. Brettell “Nineteenth Century Travellers’ Acounts of the Mediterranean Peasant”, Ethnohistory 33, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 159-173, 159 2 G.E. Mingay, “Young, Arthur (1741-1820)”, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 60: 869-875. 3 Joan Thirsk, “Edwards, Matilda Barbara Betham (1836-1919)”, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 17: 955-56.

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4 E.g. The Royal Commission on Agriculture. Reports of the assistant commissioners. Southern district of England. Report by Mr. Little on Devon, Cornwall, Dorset and Somerset (with summary of previous reports) (1882), [C.3375-I] [C.3375-II] [C.3375-III] [C.3375-IV] [C.3375-V] [C.3375-VI] refers to Metayage and cites Arthur Young. Articles in the press include: F. Seebohm, “French Peasant Proprietorship Under the Open Field System of Husbandry”, The Economic Journal 1, no., 1 (Mar., 1891): 59-72; Henry Higgs, ‘“Metayage’ in Western France”, The Economic Journal 4, no. 13 (Mar. 1894): 1-13; E. Castelot, “Rural Dwellings in France”, The Economic Journal 5, no. 17, (Mar., 1895): 89-94; Richard Henry Rew, Chapter 10, “British and French Agriculture”, in An Agricultural Faggot (London: P. S. King and Son, 1913) (chapter first published in Journal Bath and West of England Society, 4th ser., 15, 1905). Strikingly, Young was also influential for English, and indeed French, travel writers interested more broadly in the European countryside, and wanting to compare the condition of the peasantry elsewhere “with that of his own”. Brettell, “Mediterranean Peasant”, 160. 5 David Grigg, The Dynamics of Agricultural Change: The Historical Experience (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 158 6 E.g. P. H. Frere “The Poultry of France", Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 2nd ser., 2 (1866): 79-92; John Algernon Clarke, “On Increasing our Home Production of Poultry”, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England , 2nd ser., 2 (1866): 338-360. As Goodman et al. have argued, the development of large-scale capitalist agriculture in the United Kingdom was characteristically focused on the “application of scientific principles”. David Goodman, Berardo Sorj, and John Wilkinson, From Farming to Biotechnology: A Theory of Agro-Industrial Development (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 160. 7 “The French Peasant Farmer”, Ipswich Journal, 14 January, 1882, issue 8017; also see John D. Haigh, “Verney (née Nightingale), Frances Parthenope (18191890)”, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 56: 339-400. 8 Goodman, et al., From Farming to Biotechnology, 160-161; also see Matilda Betham-Edwards, Travels in France by Arthur Young During the Years 1787, 1788, 1789 (London: George Bell and Sons; 1889), xiv. 9 Grigg, Dynamics of Agricultural Change, 106, which David Grigg argues “meant there was less incentive to improve farming methods” (a loaded point). 10 Ibid.. 112-13, 126. Note that the horse only gradually replaced the ox for ploughing in France in the eighteenth century: see 180. 11 Martine Segalen, Love and Power in the Peasant Family: rural France in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Sarah Matthews (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 78-9, 81-2, 98-99, 105. 12 Ibid., 99, 105. 13 Gordon Goodwin, rev. Jonathan Brown, “Howard, James”, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28: 387-88. 14 “The French Peasant Farmers’ Seed Feed”, Daily News, 7 December, 1871. The Franco-Prussian War had become a form of cultural exchange by the time that

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Matilda Betham-Edwards wrote her In the Heart of the Vosges (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), in which she refers to German soldiers acquiring a taste for cider (290). 15 “Society of Water-colour Painters”, The Morning Chronicle, 29 April, 1850. 16 Hence a picture such as The Cottage, by Frederick W. Watts – previously attributed to Constable – that hung in the Louvre was copied “by many painters of the French school”. See “The Cottage, by F. W. Watts”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 11, no. 52 (Jul., 1907): 226, 230-231. 17 Marcia Pointon, The Bonington Circle — English Watercolour and AngloFrench Landscape 1790-1855 (Brighton: The Hendon Press, 1985), 59. 18 Ibid., 59-61, 64-5; Pointon highlights the importance of the patronage of the Duchesse de Berry, anglophile and key royalist figure, here, 63-4. 19 Caroline Fox, Stanhope Forbes and the Newlyn School (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1994), 11-13. As Kenneth McConkey has observed, it was commonplace for young European artists, and indeed artists from Japan and North America, to travel to and study in France; in this way, young artists worked in an international context at this time. Kenneth McConkey, review of J. Campbell, Peintres Irlandis en Bretagne, (Musée de Pont-Aven exhibition catalogue, 1999), Irish Arts Review Yearbook 17 (2001): 181-2. 20 McConkey, review, 182; and as McConkey goes on to argue with reference to paintings of Breton peasants by Irish artists, these images had ideological significance and impact beyond the confines of France – for the Irish, possibly in relation to colonialism and an “evasion” thereof, although he deliberately leaves the question hanging. 21 Herman Roodenberg, “Making an Island in Time: Dutch Folklore Studies, Painting, Tourism, and Craniometry around 1900”, Journal of Folklore Research 39, no. 2/3 (May-Dec 2002): 173-4. 22 Ibid., 93. 23 Ibid. Also see Kenneth McConkey, Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002). 24 Comparative material may be found in e.g. George Bourne, Lucy Bettesworth, (London: Duckworth & Co., 1913). See Karen Sayer, Women of the Fields: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth Century Rural Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 150-3. 25 Rosa Bonheur’s Horsefair was bequeathed by Jacob Bell to the National Gallery in 1865; a letter to the Times records that it was retouched by her before being put on display. Times, 27 April, 1865. 26 Christopher Wood, Paradise Lost: Paintings of English Country Life and Landscape 1830-1914 (London: Grange Books, 1988), 61. 27 Christiana Payne, Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780-1890 (New Haven and London: Yale Centre for British Art, Yale University Press, 1994), 65; Wood, Paradise Lost, 48, 61-3. 28 Payne, Toil and Plenty., 65 29 Wood, Paradise Lost., 63

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Ibid., 76-7. Payne, Toil and Plenty, 61-66, 127. 32 Wood, Paradise Lost, 86. 33 Dianne S. Macleod “Private and Public Patronage in Victorian Newcastle”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52 (1989): 200-1. 34 “Sale of Mr H. Thompson’s Art Collection”, The Liverpool Mercury, 3 November, 1881. 35 Macleod, “Private and Public Patronage in Victorian Newcastle”, 188, 202-3 36 “The Peasant Painter of France: A Visit to Millet’s Birthplace at Gruchy”, Pall Mall Gazette, 22 July, 1889. 37 Amy S. Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen: The Invention of the Peasant in the French Enlightenment, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). 38 Matilda Betham-Edwards, Anglo-French Reminiscences 1875-1899 (London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1900), 287. 39 Caroline Ford, “Landscape and Environment in French Historical and Geographical Thought: New Directions”, Review Essay, French Historical Studies, 24, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 125-134, 126. 40 Ibid., 126-7, footnote 4: “Quoted in Francoise Cachin, “Le Paysage du Peinture,” in Nation, Vol. 2:1 of Les Lieux de Memoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris, 1986), 476”. 41 Ibid., 127, 134. 42 Ibid., 127. 43 Much of this work followed Raymond Williams’s seminal The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), which questioned literary and artistic constructions of the pastoral in Britain, and their relationship to the rise and rise of capital. Ann Bermingham has subsequently argued that that there was, in Britain, by the mid-nineteenth century a shift towards a more naturalistic form of landscape painting, and to water-colours rather than oils, as the significance of agriculture declined, and as Britain became an urban nation which sought respite and relief in the country as a distant location of reduced economic importance. A. Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 157-8. Stephen Daniels, while concurring that in Britain the picturesque landscape of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century addressed the work of agricultural innovation, went on to argue that the British landscape in the form of domestic pastoral continued to hold significance for mid- to late-nineteenth century artists and audiences, especially in respect of the formation of national identity and empire. S. Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1993), 6, 214. For the United States, see Annette Kolodny’s seminal work, written at about the same time as Bermingham’s, which addressed the construction of nature in respect of the formation of American national identity and gender: A. Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 44 Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 157-8. 45 Ford, “Landscape and Environment”, 128. 31

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46 See John Barrell in The Dark Side of the Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 1-16. 47 Wyngaard, From Savage to Citizen, 30-31. 48 Brettell, “Mediterranean Peasant”, 159-161. 49 R. R. and C. R. Brettell, Painters and Peasants in the Nineteenth Century (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1983), 29-30, 42-3 50 Linda Nochlin, Representing Women (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 81. 51 E.g., Preliminary report from Her Majesty's Commissioners on Agriculture. 1881 [C.2778] [C.2778-I] [C.2778-II], 137. 52 Matilda Betham-Edwards, In the Heart of the Vosge—-and Other Sketches by a “Devious Traveller”, (London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1911), 302. For a similar comment, see 322-3. 53 Betham Edwards, Heart , 323, 327. 54 Albert Pell, “Arthur Young’s Travels in France”, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England , 1st ser., 1 (1890): 202-204, 203. 55 Betham-Edwards, Travels in France, vi, ix, xv;, xxiii. 56 Frances Parthenope Verney, “Peasant Proprietors in France” (1882), cited in “The French Peasant Farmer”, The Ipswich Journal, 14 January, 1882; Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 13 December, 1882. 57 Betham-Edwards, Travels in France, xxiv. 58 James R. Lehning, Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3. 59 Ibid., 14, 16. 60 Katherine S. Macquoid, Through Brittany, (London: Chatto and Windus, c. 1877), 1-4, 12. 61 Ibid., 4-5. 62 Ibid., 1. 63 Rew, An Agricultural Faggot, 164-5: he travels by car: modern eye sees Roman agriculture. 64 Higgs, ‘“Metayage’”, 1. 65 Higgs, ‘“Metayage’’’, 9. 66 On depopulation see e.g. G. B. Longstaff, “Rural Depopulation”, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 56, no. 3: 380-442; W. E. Bear, “Our Agricultural Population,” The Economic Journal 4, no. 14 (Jun., 1894): 317-331 67 Sayer, Women of the Fields, 20-21, 24. See R. Sales, English Literature in History 1750-1830, Pastoral and Politics (London: Hutchinson, 1983): though writing about pastoral in Britain in an earlier period, his concept of Requiem, in which past values are recovered for the present, is valuable here. 68 Macquoid, Brittany, 23 69 Brettell, “Mediterranean Peasant”, 164. 70 Ibid., 165-6. 71 Haigh, “Verney”, ODNB. 72 Verney, “Peasant Proprietors in France” (1882), extracts in the Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 13 December 1882. 73 Brettell, Painters and Peasants, 59-61.

CHAPTER FIVE PIERRE LOTI LIES AT THE BOTTOM OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S SEA OF MEMORIES MARIALUISA BIGNAMI

… on le jeta dans un de ces gouffres d’eau, qui s’ouvrent et aussitôt se referment … il disparut, plongé tout de suite dans le silence pour jamais, et commençant sa descente infinie, dans les ténèbres insondées d’en dessous …1

Like the hapless Jean Berny, the protagonist of Pierre Loti’s naval novel Matelot (1893), who lies buried at sea, the French author himself lies immersed in the depths of Joseph Conrad’s memories of reading. But, unlike the sailor, he does not always stay at the bottom: instead, he and his work surface occasionally in the form of echoes in many passages of the English writer’s works. Tracing these echoes and their significance in Conrad’s narratives—especially where the sea is concerned—is the aim of this chapter, a critical approach which is likely to be more productive than conducting a mere comparison of the works of the two authors, which might well involve sailing dangerous waters. The aim here is to identify the narrative structures, the typology of characters, and the stylistic choices which Joseph Conrad may have derived from Pierre Loti; also, how much he enriched his narrative perspectives by echoing the French writer. It is possible to feel the presence of the older French author in the fiction of the younger English one, and this is best demonstrated by the use of concrete examples. While Conrad will be a familiar figure to many British and European readers, Pierre Loti is rather less well known and some brief background information will assist the reader of the present chapter. Born to a French Protestant family in 1850, his real name was Julien Viaud. He joined the French navy as an officer and thus travelled all over the globe. While in the Pacific islands, he took on the nom de plume Pierre Loti, which he employed for his numerous publications, mainly exotic and romantic

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novels set in the Near and Far East, in Northern Africa and the Pacific, always interspersed with periods at the French naval stations, such as Brest. He also wrote travel books, such as L’Inde sans les Anglais. His most famous work is Pêcheur d’Islande, a romantic story of love and death, set in Brittany among Iceland fishermen and their families. He died in 1923, having retired from the navy and becoming a member of the Académie Française.2 In order to pursue the project of identifying the presence of Loti in Conrad’s fictions, it is necessary to map out Conrad’s reading history: this is an essential step, since Conrad hardly attended any regular schools, where he would have had set books to read. After reading in childhood and youth books supplied by his intellectual father (generally works by French and English authors which he was translating into Polish), Conrad went on to read randomly according to his taste. While D.W. Tutein 1990’s publication is a work of limited usefulness—because it is a mere list of titles drawn from secondary literature—Yves Hervouet’s scholarly monograph of the same year is of much more interest here. Hervouet deals specifically with French authors whose works Conrad read and who influenced his writings in various ways, in a significant contribution to Conrad studies which stresses the importance of French literature to his fiction. Nevertheless, his painstaking work focuses primarily on the better known authors such as Flaubert, Maupassant, and Anatole France, and does not (in my opinion) do full justice to the influence of Pierre Loti.3 It is a well known fact that not only was Conrad in the habit of reading all the French authors that came his way, but also that he had an astonishing mastery of the French language. Indeed, throughout his writing career he considered French rather than English the appropriate language of literature, at least if we are to believe what Ford Madox Ford, his fellow writer, had to say. In A Personal Remembrance, written in late 1924, shortly after Conrad’s death, Ford evocatively recalled rides with Conrad in the English countryside, and reported the writer’s reflections on the language which could be employed to describe the surrounding landscape. During these conversations Conrad would ask: how we should render a field of ripe corn, a ten-acre patch of blue-purple cabbage. We would try the words in French: sillonné, bleu-foncé, bleu-duroi; we would try back into English … He went on thinking first of French and then of English: ‘Champs de blés que les vents faibles sillonnaient. … Fields of wheat that the weak … feeble … light … what sorts of winds, breezes, airs…’ … ‘Fields of wheat that small winds ruffled into cat’s-paws … That is, of course, too literary’: thus Conrad would conclude.4

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This goes to suggest that Conrad never stopped looking at the world with a writer’s eyes, even when considering the most everyday sights: in the episode described by Ford, the object of his gaze was the familiar English countryside. Conrad began with a description in French, but, with the sensitive ear for language that he clearly possessed, he perceived the resulting passage in English as literary; yet, at the same time, he apparently could not help going through such a procedure in search of the mot juste. Turning to Loti’s French prose, imaginative and figurative as it is, it can be seen that, in general, it would sound very literary indeed if it were to be more or less directly transposed into English. Of course, Loti was not the only French literary influence on the English author, but it is not the purpose of this chapter to discuss the acknowledged influence of such authors as Flaubert and Maupassant, but rather to explore the presence in his fictions of a minor writer who, being very prolific, could supply many examples for Conrad. Conrad’s style was influenced by the tendency to heavily adjectival prose to be found in French popular authors, and it frequently verges on the purple prose of Loti, not always with a positive outcome. Take, for instance, the prose of such a novel as Mariage de Loti (1880) with its rich descriptions of the exotic Tahitian landscape, which the European naval officer shares with his native lover Rarahu, herself a part of the backdrop. Here is one such description: A quelques pas plus loin, sous l’ombrage triste des goyaviers, était ce basin plus isolé ou c’était passée l’enfance de Rarahu, … Tout était bien resté tel qu’autrefois, dans cet endroit où l’air avait toujours la fraicheur de l’eau courante … c’étaient bien ces mêmes herbes et cette même odeur,— mélangée de plantes aromatiques et de goyaves mures. Nous suspendimes nos vêtements aux branches,—et puis nous nous assimes dans l’eau, savourant le plaisir de nous retrouver encore, et pour la dernière fois, en pareo, au baisser du soleil, dans le ruisseau de Fataoua.5

At this point we cannot but call to mind some passages in Almayer’s Folly, in which a very literary exotic landscape, seen on a moon-lit night, is used as a redundant backdrop to the meetings of a couple of lovers, Dain and Nina: “As they passed together out of the red light of the fire into the silver shower of the rays that fell upon the clearing…”.6 In these and in similar cases, in which an exotic landscape is depicted, Conrad, guided by the florid prose of his French master, does not seem to have shaped an appropriate stylistic choice in English. It is otherwise with the sea. Both Loti and Conrad were seamen by trade, before starting to write their sea stories; neither had ever gone to sea looking for exotic adventure and very seldom for pleasure—and here one

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reference may suffice from the officer of the English merchant marine, “to a man who had but little to do with pleasure sailing”, Conrad says of himself in The Mirror of the Sea.7 As for Pierre Loti, he too belonged to the “fellowship of the craft”, being an officer in the French navy. They both were aware of the fact that the language to be used on board ships had to be precise and spare, it had to reflect the exactness of the appropriate operations on board; this necessity of keeping to matters of fact they clearly perceived to be a requirement, too, of the narrative language employed when representing such a world, a language which ought to be as spare and logical as the art of navigation itself. In fact, the abstraction, clarity, and rationality of the navigational sciences are used by both authors as not only stylistic guides, but as signifiers in character and plot developments too. An instance from Pierre Loti: Jean, the above-mentioned protagonist of Matelot, never leaves his status in the ranks and never has a chance of entering the naval college of Brest, with its school ship “Borda” (where the author himself had been) and becoming an officer, precisely because he is lazy with his mathematical studies, repeatedly refusing to apply himself to this discipline. Therefore he is unable to pass the exam which is necessary for his advancement. All through his youthful years he meant to “suivre les cours d’hydrographie, et passer enfin les examens de capitaine au long cours. Pour ces beaux projets, il eut été sage de se remettre un peu aux mathematiques”.8 But he never gets round to it. He never schools himself in the appropriate discipline and the precise language pertaining to it, despite the fact that he romantically carries his mathematics exercisebook with him all the way around the world, and it accompanies him to the bottom of the sea—as we shall see in the burial scene. Countless examples of the significance of the navigational sciences in Conrad’s sea stories can be cited to show a similar trope at work: there is, for instance, the episode of the handbook of navigation, found by mere chance by Charlie Marlow in the African jungle in Heart of Darkness (1899). The handbook stands as an example of well-ordered practice, confronting that supreme instance of irrational attitudes which is the essence of the land-locked African novel. Thus much for the sobering influence of the art of navigation in general on the behaviour of men. But Conrad, later in his life, had something to say more specifically about the language to be used when speaking about work on the sea: “to take a liberty with technical language is a crime against the clearness, precision, and beauty of perfected speech”, he argues in one of the sketches contained in The Mirror of the Sea.9 By now it will have become clear to readers that this chapter will concentrate on the sea-novels by the two

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authors, waters in which the search for echoes of Loti’s tales in Conrad’s work seems to be most rewarding. In dealing with the sea-fiction of both authors, the question often arises as to whether these texts are to be considered as autobiographical, an issue which has been elegantly discussed by (for instance) Francis Lacoste (1997):10 however, although alert to the fact that both Loti and Conrad knew the life of the sea from having worked on the sailing ships they represent, it is not the aim of this chapter to establish whether the two authors reported actual details from their own lives when constructing a work of fiction, or created characters based on real people whom they had met while at sea. When reading the two authors in conjunction, it is not only their treatment of the experience of the sea which shows an affinity: it is also rewarding, although less straightforward, to consider the function, in the two authors’ works, of Brittany’s harsh landscape, “le rude pays Breton”, so defined in Pêcheur d’Islande,11 a landscape which is after all closely connected with the sea. Loti knew this region very well, and it often stands as a dark and cruel background behind the human predicament in his sea novels. Conrad himself paid a lengthy visit to this part of France on his honeymoon in 1896 and thus also became familiar with it. His biographer, John Batchelor, reports with some surprise a comment on this honeymoon: “He took Jessie to Brittany, where she was, as he wrote to Garnett on 9 April 1896, a ‘very good comrade and no bother at all’ … and was required (on her honeymoon) to continue typing her husband’s work”.12 During this period, which one would suppose to be a particularly happy one, Conrad somewhat paradoxically wrote the tragic and gloomy short narrative, “The Idiots”, allegedly after meeting locally an unhappy family similar to the one depicted in the story. Batchelor comments: “‘The Idiots’ is a sensational tale (based on observation of a local family) about a tragic peasant couple who are unable to bear normal children. It is an odd work to be written by a man on his honeymoon, not least in that its theme suggests that Conrad’s mind was running on disastrous possible outcomes of his own marriage”.13 However, a literary rather than personal source, that is to say a relationship with a story by Maupassant, has also been suggested.14 As an example of the use made by Conrad of the location, here is the tragic seascape, seen at night, which supplies the background to the death of the woman protagonist of the story: High sharp rocks that, when the bay is full, show above the glittering plain of blue water like pointed towers of submerged churches … Susan met the incoming tide by the Raven islet … She had been scrambling among the boulders of the Raven … The Raven is connected with the main land by a natural pier of immense and slippery stones … She started, slipped, fell …

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Far below he saw the water whitened by her struggles, and heard one shrill cry for help that seemed to dart upwards along the perpendicular face of the rock, and soar past, straight into the high and impassive heaven.15

Loti’s Brittany would also have surfaced at this point. For Loti, too, Brittany can be a place of woe: one cannot help remarking that the families depicted in Pêcheur d’Islande are just as unlucky as the English author’s protagonists, and live under conditions just as hard as do the characters in Conrad’s story. And in Loti, there is the same rugged and dangerous Breton seascape experienced from a boat, in Mon Frère Yves: Brusquement, le soir, il se fait une éclaircie, et une chose noir se dresse tout près de nous, surprenante, inattendue, comme un haut fantôme surgissant de la mer: ‘Ar Men Du (les Pierres Noires)!’ dit notre vieux pilote breton. Et, en même temps, partout le voile se dechire. Ouessant apparait; toutes ses roches sombres, tous ses écueils se déssinent en grisailles, obscures, battus par des hautes gerbes d’écume blanche, sous un ciel qui parait lourd comme un globe de plomb.16

In the sections which take place ashore in the other two novels by Loti considered in the present chapter, Brittany often supplies a grey, gloomy backdrop to human vicissitudes, a venue for scenes as full of unhappiness and pain as those in Conrad’s stories. This is particularly the case with the city of Brest, bleakly depicted with its grey stone buildings and its unremitting weather. Consider, for instance, the inhospitable urban landscape in two passages from Mon Frère Yves: in the first, the narrator awakens on New Year’s Day: “Au fond de l’arsenal de Brest … En haut le ciel avait commencé à blanchir entre les grandes murailles de granit que nous enfermaient”.17 Further on, Yves’s wife, while he is on the high seas, goes to the marine paying office to get her part of his salary: Cette rue des Voutes est toute pleine de femmes qui attendent là depuis le matin, à la porte d’une laide batisse en granit: la Caisse des gens de mer. Femmes de Brest que la pluie ne rebutte plus, elles causent aigrement les pieds dans l’eau, pressées contre les murs de la ruelle triste, sous le brouillard gris.18

Evidence that Conrad had actually read Loti’s fictions, both those set in exotic locations and those set on the sea, and had enjoyed them, can be drawn for instance from Conrad’s letters (for example, those to Ernest Dawson, July 1908; to Jean Masbrenier, February 1913). It is acknowledged by most Conrad biographers;19 it is also supported, of

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course, by Tutein’s and Hervouet’s research. In addition to being Conrad’s senior by seven years, Loti began writing at a younger age than the British author: so his books were already on the market, and enjoying considerable success and a wide circulation, when Conrad was still tentatively planning his own first novel. At the same time Conrad, who had not had regular school education, was reading voraciously to fill up the empty hours between watches on board, as well as making good use of time during stays in remote ports and in health resorts: thus there was ample opportunity and time for the works of the older writer to influence the younger one—or at least to linger on in his memory, which is what is being investigated here. As far as Loti’s marine novels are concerned, this chapter will concentrate on three novels which predate Conrad’s published work: on Mon Frère Yves (1883), on Pêcheur d’Islande (1886), which I would suggest is the richest text, and lastly, Matelot (1893). This last work is by far the least well-written, but it is the one which seems, in my opinion, to have the most sustained presence in Conrad’s memory. Matelot is also the most unmitigated sea-novel of the three, in the sense that it deals far less than the other two with terra firma and its inhabitants; it thus comes closest to Conrad’s quintessential sea-novel, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), which exhibits its influence most clearly. Matelot begins with the young sailor’s adventures on a smuggling boat, the captain of which says of it “Qu’il marche ou qu’il crève!”,20 words which sound exactly like the motto “Do or die” inscribed on the stern of the “Judea”, the ship on which Conrad’s early story “Youth” (1898) takes place: “The old bark lumbered on … through an interminable procession of days; and the fresh gilding flashed back at the setting sun, seemed to cry down over the darkening sea the words painted on her stern, ‘Judea, London. Do or die’”.21 Matelot then goes on to tell a long story, relating the whole life of Jean Berny, the simple sailor of the title, a life which is not entirely spent on board, although it is always concerned with the sea. By contrast, the Nigger is a much more compact narration, which concentrates on the four-month voyage of the ship “Narcissus”, sailing home from India round the Cape and never stopping between Bombay and London. This narrative hardly contains any tangential stories on the life on land of its crew, which could in fact make up a background to the voyage itself; indeed, such digressions are intentionally avoided. Yet—and this is the interesting point—the homeward-bound voyage, which in Matelot should take Jean back to France from the East, has the same final quality of the voyage of the “Narcissus” and proves as fatal to Jean as it proves to Jimmy Wait, the “nigger” of Conrad’s title: both characters die at sea and both are buried there, in sad ceremonies which in both cases

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turn to tragedy. In Matelot, the ailing Jean asks to be permitted to sail home from French Indochina on the invalid transport the “Saone”, in order to be with his friends as well as to avoid the fatigue of the Red Sea weather (“les accablements de la mer Rouge”).22 His ship, therefore, comes round the long way, by the Cape, and he dies during a storm in the Southern Atlantic; similarly, Jimmy dies during a deadly calm in the same ocean. They both miss reaching home by a few days, and they are both buried at sea. Let us compare the two burials, beginning with Jean’s: Un sinistre matin, au jour naissant, cousu dans sa gaine de toile, il fut monté péniblement, par deux hommes qui le tenaient au cou. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il y a, demandaient-ils, qu’est-ce qu’il y a, dans le sac, avec lui – des livres?’ C’étaient les cahiers du Borda [the school-ship of the naval college] … A grand’peine, à cause de tant de roulis, ils le montaient, avec des brutalités involontaires, qui heurtaient contre des angles de bois sa tête à jamais voile … Le pretre, agé et malade, n’avait pas même pu venir, par ce gros temps dangereux, dire les prières des morts. Et les hommes de corvée étaient seuls, sur ce pont que les lames balayaient. Pendant un plus effroyable mouvement de roulis, on le jeta dans un de ces gouffres d’eau, qui s’ouvrent et aussitôt se referment. Malgré le pois de fer attaché a ses pieds, une lame, une montée d’ecume, le relança d’abord contre le navire, avec une force à briser les os; puis il disparut ...23

Jimmy’s is remarkably similar: On two planks nailed together and apparently resigned and still under the folds of the Union Jack … James Wait, carried aft by four men, was deposited slowly, with his feet pointing to an open port … Two men made ready and waited for those words that send so many of our brothers to their last plunge. … Mr. Baker read out: ‘To the deep’, and paused. The men lifted the inboard end of the planks, the boatswain snatched off the Union Jack, and James Wait did not move … he yet seemed to cling to the ship. Belfast … sprang out of the crowd with his arm extended. ‘Go, Jimmy!— Jimmy, go! Go!’ His fingers touched the head of the body, and the grey package started reluctantly to whizz off the lifted planks.24

Neither scene ends peacefully: Jean’s body ends up with broken bones, Jimmy’s body has to be pushed from the ship. Again, in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, before the calm which marks Jimmy’s death, the ship passes through a mighty storm at the cold southernmost point in its voyage, a storm which is meant by the author to test and show the stuff of which its crew is made; similarly in Pêcheur d’Islande the Icelandic fishing-boat “Marie” meets with a powerful storm in the cold arctic waters and the men have to suspend their fishing in order

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to concentrate on weathering the tempest. In both cases, the “heroic figure” of the story—Old Singleton in one case, young Yann in the other, with his bosom friend Sylvestre—is entrusted with the important and dangerous duty of holding the helm in the face of fierce winds and breakers. Again, reading the two texts together can be fruitful: it shows how only a hero can accomplish this sort of dangerous but essential duty. In both cases, the harsh predicament and its emotional ramifications are depicted in surprisingly spare language: Ils restaient tous deux [Yann and Sylvestre] à la barre, attachés et se tenants ferme, vêtus de leur cirages, qui étaient durs et luisants comme des peaux de requins … Après chaque grande masse d’eau tombée, ils se regardaient—en souriant, à cause de tout ce sel amassé dans leur barbe … Ils n’étaient plus que deux piliers de chair raidie qui maintenaient cette barre; que deux bêtes vigoureuses cramponnées là par instinct pour ne pas mourir.25 Apart, far aft, and alone by the helm, old Singleton had deliberately tucked his white beard under the top button of his glistening coat. Swaying upon the din and tumult of the seas … he stood rigidly still, forgotten by all, and with an attentive face. In front of his erect figure only the two arms moved crosswise with a swift and sudden readiness, to check or urge again the rapid stir of circling spokes. He steered with care.26

Loti’s many and famous exotic novels have been excluded from this analysis, for the pertinent reason that they do not seem to me to have a proper counterpart in Conrad. We must also respect the English author’s repeated refusal to be considered an exotic novelist: for instance, in an unpublished letter to John Quinn (written on 9 May 1916 and held in the Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library) he says “I am something else and perhaps something more than a writer … of the tropics, I am not even generally exotic”. Then, towards the end of his life in 1919, in the “Author’s Note” for the Collected Doubleday edition to the novel An Outcast of the Islands, which had been originally published in 1896, he wrote: “An Outcast of the Islands … though it brought me the qualification of ‘exotic writer’ I don’t think the charge was at all justified. For the life of me I don’t see that there is the slightest exotic spirit in the conception or style of that novel”27—where the telling word is of course “charge”, as if being exotic were a sin or a crime. Indeed, it seems perverse to place him in that category, despite his south-east Asian locations and a handful of native characters, because there is not where his interest lies. Yet it must be acknowledged that even Conrad, like Loti, occasionally gives voice, in his sea-novels, to the fascination of the east

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for his hard-working and sober sailors. So, to conclude with a whiff of the Orient: it is mainly through its perfumes that the East reaches Conrad’s characters when they are still at sea, before they properly set foot on the territory from which the perfumes themselves originate. Which is as it should be: it is a sort of sensory fascination experienced in the dark and from afar, which anticipates the actual encounter with the East and which is more significant, in its dream-like atmosphere, than the meeting itself. To start with Loti, as usual: it is an exotic atmosphere, a Levant, which, in Matelot, begins for Jean close to home, in the eastern Mediterranean, on one of his first voyages, when his ship reaches the island of Rhodes: … l’arrivée brusque du printemps, du printemps oriental … c’était pour augmenter encore, aux yeux de Jean, la magie de ce Levant tout nouveau— desiré, revé … Oh! La première soirée qui survint, si limpide et si tranquille, imprégnée de telles senteurs étrangères”.28

And later on, while sailing the Red Sea: “Et, en avant de lui, restait l’inquiétude attirante, l’énigme de cet Extrème-Orient jamais vu”.29 Similarly, Charlie Marlow, on his first voyage to the East, while still offshore, in the story “Youth” (1898), experiences a “a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night–the first sigh of the East on my face”:30 almost the self-same words employed by Loti. Further down on the same page, within a somewhat purple passage, Conrad writes: “The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave”. In Lord Jim (1900), Jim, the quintessential dreamer and tainted seaman, first experiences the East—not at night this time, but still from a distance which excludes sight—at the hospital on a hill above Singapore: “a gentle breeze entering through the windows … brought into the bare room the softness of the sky, the languor of the earth, the bewitching breath of the Eastern waters. There were perfumes in it …”.31 Thus, with a scented intimation of the East, has the memory of Loti’s narratives found another way of surfacing in Joseph Conrad’s texts.

Bibliography Baines, Jocelyn. Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. London: Weidenfeld, and Nicolson, 1960 and 1993. Batchelor, John. The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Blanch, Lesley. Pierre Loti: Portrait of an Escapist. London: Collins, 1983.

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Bongie, Charles. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siècle. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Conrad, Joseph. Almayer’s Folly. 1895. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. —.“The Idiots”, in Tales of Unrest. 1898. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1985. —. Lord Jim. 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. —. The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record. 1906. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. —. The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. 1897. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963. —. An Outcast of the Islands, 1896. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1976. —. “Youth”, in Youth and The End of the Tether. 1902. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Ford, Ford Madox. A Personal Remembrance. New York: The Ecco Press, 1989. Hervouet, Yves. The French Face of Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Karl, F. R., and Davies, L. eds. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. 9 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983-2008. Lacoste, F. “L’Ambiguité de la Pseudo-Biographie chez Loti”, in La Création Biographique/Biographical Creation, edited by M. Dvorak, 179-86. Rennes: University Press of Rennes, 1997. Loti, Pierre. Mariage de Loti. 1880. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1925. —. Matelot. 1893. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1898. —. Mon Frère Yves. Paris: Calmann Lévy,1883. Project Gutenberg, 2006. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18427/18427-h/18427-h.htm. —. Pécheur d’Islande. 1886. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1970. Moore, G. M. “Conrad’s ‘The Idiots’ and Maupassant’s ‘La Mère aux Monstres’”, in Conrad: Intertexts & Appropriations, edited by G. M. Moore, O. Knowles and J. H. Stape, 49-58. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. Najder, Z. Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutger University Press, 1983. Tutein, David W. Joseph Conrad’s Reading. West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press,1990. Watt, I. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

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Notes 1

Pierre Loti, Matelot (1893; Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1898), 207. Lesley Blanch, Pierre Loti: Portrait of an Escapist (London, Collins, 1983); this is the most recent biography available and it is in English; the most recent French biography dates from 1937. 3 David W. Tutein, Joseph Conrad’s Reading: An Annotated Bibliography (West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1990); Yves Hervouet, The French Face of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 4 Ford Madox Ford, A Personal Remembrance (New York: The Ecco Press, 1989), 25-27. 5 Pierre Loti, Mariage de Loti (1880; Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1925), 274-76: “A few steps away, under the sad(dening) shade of the guava trees, lay this more isolated basin where the childhood of Rarahu had been spent … All things had remained like at other times, in that spot where the air always carried the coolness of running water … they were the same herbs and the same odors – mixed with aromatic plants and ripe guavas. We hung our clothes on the branches and then we sat down in the water savouring the pleasure of finding ourselves together again and for the last time, in a pareo, at sundown, in the Fataoua stream” (my translation). 6 Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly (1895; Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1976), 140. 7 Joseph Conrad, “The Fine Art”, in The Mirror of the Sea & A Personal Record (1906; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 23. 8 Loti, Matelot, 84-85: “follow hydrography courses and finally sit his examination for the patent as master mariner. For these beautiful projects, it would have been wise to go back somewhat to mathematics” (my translation). 9 Joseph Conrad, “Emblems of Hope”, in The Mirror of the Sea & A Personal Record (1906; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13. 10 Francis Lacoste, “L’Ambiguité de la Pseudo-Biographie chez Loti”, in La Création Biographique/Biographical Creation, ed. M. Dvorak (Rennes: University Press of Rennes, 1997), 179-86. 11 Pierre Loti, Pêcheur d’Islande (1886; Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1970), 227. 12 John Batchelor, The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 57-58. 13 Ibid., 58. 14 G. M. Moore, “Conrad’s ‘The Idiots’ and Maupassant’s ‘La Mère aux Monstres’”, in Conrad: Intertexts & Appropriations, ed. G. M. Moore, O. Knowles and J. H. Stape (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 49-58. 15 Joseph. Conrad, “The Idiots”, in Tales of Unrest (1898; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 77-81. 16 Pierre Loti, Mon Frère Yves (1883; Paris, Calmann Lévy,1899), 100: “Suddenly, in the evening, it clears up, and a black thing stands up near us, surprising, unexpected, like a tall ghost rising from the sea: ‘Ar Men Du (the Black Rocks)!’, said our old Breton pilot. And at the same time, everywhere the veil is rent. Ouessant appears; all the dark rocks, all its cliffs are drawn in greys, gloomy, 2

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struck by tall plumes of white foam, under a sky that looked as heavy as a globe of lead” (my translation). 17 Ibid., 87-88: “At the bottom of the Brest arsenal … Up high the sky had begun to pale between the great walls of granite that shut us in” (my translation). 18 Ibid., 122: “This rue des Voutes is completely full of women who have been waiting there since morning, at the door of an ugly granite building: the paying office of the workers of the sea. Brest women, that the rain no longer discourages, they chat bitterly their feet in water, pressed against the wall of the sad lane, under the grey fog” (my translation). 19 Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 43; Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, (1960; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), 162; Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutger University Press, 1983), 178, 284; Batchelor, Life, 54. 20 Loti, Matelot, 41. 21 J. Conrad, “Youth”, in Youth and The End of the Tether (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 20. 22 Loti, Matelot, 180. 23 Ibid., 206-7: “On a sinister morning, at break of dawn, sewn up into his canvas wrapping, he was brought on deck by two men that held him by his neck. “What is there, they asked, inside the sack, with him – some books?” It was the notebooks of the Borda [the school-ship of the naval college] … With a great effort, because of the rolling, they brought him up, with involuntary brutality, that sent against the wooden angles his head forever veiled … The priest, old and sick, could not attend, because of that strong and dangerous bad weather, to say the prayers for the dead. And the men of the corvée burying party were alone on that deck washed by the breakers. During a more frightening rolling movement, he was thrown into one of those troughs of water that open up and immediately close themselves. Despite the iron weight suspended to his feet, a breaker, a surge of foam, sent him back towards the ship, with a strength fit to break his bones; then he disappeared …” (my translation). 24 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 132-34. 25 Loti, Pêcheur d’Islande, 75-77: “They both [Yann and Sylvestre] remained at the helm, hanging on and keeping steady, dressed in their oilskins, that were hard and glistening like shark skins … After the fall of every great mass of water, they would look at each other—smiling because of all the salt amassed on their beards … They were by now nothing but two pillars of rigid flesh made stiff that held that helm; nothing but two strong beasts there by instinct, in order not to die” (my translation). 26 Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, 80. 27 Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (1896; Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1976), 8. 28 Loti, Matelot, 44-5: “The sudden arrival of Spring, of oriental Spring … was bound to increase once more, in Jean’s eyes, the magic of that all-new Levant –

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desired, dreamed … Oh! The first evening that befell, so clear and calm, thick with such strange perfumes” (my translation). 29 Ibid., 162: “And, in front of him, remained the attractive disquietude, the enigma of that Far East never seen” (my translation). 30 Conrad, “Youth”, 35. 31 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 12.

CHAPTER SIX “WHY ALL THE LITTLE MEN IN FRANCE [ARE] SOLDIERS AND ALL THE BIG MEN POSTILLIONS”: DICKENS’S VISION OF FRANCE AND THE FRENCH IN PICTURES FROM ITALY (1846) NATHALIE VANFASSE

France is not the main country explored by Charles Dickens and his family in Pictures from Italy in the summer of 1844. In fact it does not even appear in the title of the travel book, which shows that it is mainly a stopover on the road to Italy. However, Dickens does describe in some detail the locations he travels through and their inhabitants. What did he choose to represent, and how? The first three chapters of Pictures from Italy are devoted to travelling through France. From Paris to Lyons, Dickens’s pictures remain sketchy, whereas from Avignon onward the descriptions become more detailed, partly through the superimposition of different time frames. As for the inhabitants of these areas, they remain stereotypical throughout the narrative. This article will consider whether these views of France and the French were specifically Dickensian, and whether they were typical of Dickens’s attitude to foreigners. It will also examine whether they evolve as Dickens becomes better acquainted with the country and its inhabitants. It will analyse Dickens’s stance as possibly symptomatic of broader British prejudices towards French and Continental people, or towards particular elements of Continental life, such as Roman Catholicism. Finally, it will finally endeavour to relate Dickens’s allusions to France and its inhabitants in this piece of travel writing to descriptions of this country in his work as a whole.1

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Sketches and Generalisations The description of the journey between Paris and Lyons consists mainly of sketches and generalisations. The first chapter of the travel narrative is entitled “Going Through France”, which clearly shows that France was by no means the final destination of Dickens’s trip and that he had no intention of staying there, at least on that occasion. The narrative paradoxically skips the crossing of the Channel from Dover to Boulogne, as well as the trip between Boulogne and the French capital, and begins in the Rue de Rivoli in Paris as the carriage leaves the Hôtel Meurice where the family has stayed for two days. The family obviously travelled in style, as the Hôtel Meurice was, and still is, a luxury hotel situated opposite the Tuileries gardens, between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre museum. Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in France lists it as second after the upmarket Hôtel du Louvre.2 It describes “The Meurice” as “a comfortable and well-managed house, almost exclusively frequented by English and Americans”: even breakfast was adapted to English and American taste, since the guidebook mentions “breakfast, tea and coffee with eggs”.3 The Dickens family was obviously keen to adjust gently to France and the French. Later in the narrative, Dickens briefly sojourns, this time on his own, in two other Parisian hotels, the Hotel Bristol and the Hotel Brighton, the names of which reveal that they catered primarily for British customers. Nevertheless, the Dickens family was by no means francophobic: they hired a French courier to attend them during their journey to and their stay in Italy.4 One may wonder about this choice, considering their main destination was Italy, not France, and the fact that they had been taking Italian and not French lessons in preparation for their expedition. Paris, the first stage of the journey actually described in Pictures from Italy (the crossing of the Channel and the arrival in Boulogne are omitted), is in fact hardly mentioned at all. The reader is given only a few details about the city on the morning of the family’s departure for Sens. Some of these details are specific to Paris or at least to French towns: for instance, the wineshops, the cafés with their awnings and chairs and tables outside or the “narrow, up-hill, funnel-like streets across the River”,5 which are now limited to areas such as the Latin Quarter, but were once to be found all over Paris before the Haussmanian changes of the 1850s, as Kate Flint has pointed out in her notes to the Penguin edition to Pictures from Italy.6 Other details mentioned by Dickens are much less idiosyncratic and could be applied to any bustling town, for instance the “dense perspectives of crowd and bustle”, the family pleasure parties, or the contemplative

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holiday-makers.7 However, the intense activity still going on in the heart of Paris on a Sunday does differ from the quietude of the City of London on the same day of the week; this was later described by Dickens in The Uncommercial Traveller (1860), in an essay significantly entitled “The City of the Absent”, with a play on the word “absent” which refers both to the deserted City outside business hours and to the occupants of the City churchyards. 8 Paris is mentioned again a little later in Pictures from Italy, when Dickens briefly returns to London in November 1844. He spends two days in the French capital on his way back to Italy in December and on this occasion he notices “extraordinary adventurers in heaps of rags, groping in the snowy streets with little rakes, in search of odds and ends”.9 Marcus Stone, who illustrated the 1862 Library Edition of Pictures from Italy, elaborated on this snippet by giving these men their precise name in the title of his engraving “Le Chiffonnier”, and a specific appearance which must have been helpful to English readers. With their intent gaze directed towards the ground, the chiffonniers alluded to by Dickens and represented by Stone must have been male counterparts of the old lady collecting bits and pieces in a Parisian public garden depicted by the famous French cartoonist, Honoré Daumier, in a 1841 print entitled “La Glaneuse” and published in the newspaper Le Charivari. On the whole, Paris is barely described in Pictures from Italy. Dickens devotes considerably more of his narrative to the journey between Paris and Marseilles where the family boards a ship for Genoa. The first three days, the family travels from Paris to Sens, Avallon, and Chalons. They then pass down the Saône and the Rhône rivers on steamboats to Lyons and Avignon, before driving down to Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles where they board a ship for Genoa. Such was travelling between Paris and Marseilles before the advent of the railway in 1856. The construction of a railway connecting the two cities had started in the 1840s, but only reached completion in 1856.10 Although French roads had begun to be macadamised from the 1830s onward, dust and uneven pavements still remained some of the inconveniences of travelling in the 1840s. Dickens’s inventive and evocative writing imitates the movement and sound of the carriage on the uneven paving stones, successfully conveying the discomfort of the travellers on the “never-to-be-forgotten-or-forgiven pavement that surrounds Paris”,11 or when arriving in a French inn: The carriage begins to rattle and roll over a horribly uneven pavement. As if the equipage were a great firework, and the mere sight of a smoking cottage chimney had lighted it, instantly it begins to crack and splutter, as if the very devil were in it. Crack, crack, crack, crack …; and here we are

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in the yard of the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or; used up, gone out, smoking, spent, exhausted …12

Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in France depicts the routes between Paris and Lyons as having “no fair sample” of France’s beauties. This part of France is described as “a wearisome expanse of tillage, unvaried by hill or dale, and extent of corn-land or pasture, without enclosures, extremely wearisome”.13 Dickens seems to pick up on these remarks when he states that there is “little more than one variety in the appearance of the country, for the first two days [of the journey]. From a dreary plain, to an interminable avenue, to a dreary plain again”.14 Instead of commenting upon the first three days of his journey across France, Dickens sums them up in one day intended to encapsulate the dullness of all three: “the first three days of travelling towards Marseilles are quiet and monotonous enough … A sketch of one day’s proceedings is a sketch of all three…”.15 The word “sketch” with its double meaning of glimpse or insight but also of croquis indicates that these dull sights are not worth a long contemplation, and that a quick doodle suffices to represent them. Dickens does, however, dwell to some extent on the landscape which he saw during those three days: he notices and personifies medieval towns “drawbridged and walled”,16 such as Avallon, and observes that the inhabitants of these areas are invisible, especially the children. Apart from innumerable beggars, the only human beings whom he claims to have met in this part of France are the drivers of little wagons bringing cheese from Switzerland, Young France passengers of the diligence (the French equivalent to a stagecoach), passengers of the malle poste (equivalent to English mail-coaches), old curés in clattering coaches, and bony shepherdesses. To give his reader a more local flavour, Dickens uses a few French words such “hôtel de ville”, “château”, “Diligence”, “Malle Poste” or “Curés”. He finds these regions highly unattractive with their low vines growing on straight sticks instead of being elegantly trained in festoons, as in the south of France or in Italy. Some objects remain a mystery to him, for instance, the strange little round towers with peaked roofs which can be found everywhere in “gardens and fields, and down lanes and in farm yards”. According to Dickens they are “never used for any purpose at all”,17 which seems improbable and more likely to be a sign of Dickens’s lack of understanding of some French realities. The mysterious little towers to which he refers are likely to have been simply pigeon houses. A few inns are mentioned in this part of the journey, notably the Auberge de l’Écu D’Or, but this name does not refer to a specific establishment. Instead, it is intended to epitomise all the inns found along this part of Dickens’s route. Dickens is struck by the dangling bush which signals that

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wine is sold inside, by the napkins in the dining rooms folded in cockedhat fashion, by the red tile floors, the large vases under glass shades filled with artificial flowers and the number of clocks displayed on the premises.18 Having reached Lyons, Dickens presents the city as the symbol of all manufacturing towns, just as Coketown will be depicted later as a generic type of industrial northern English towns in his novel Hard Times (1854): “Every manufacturing town, melted into one, would hardly convey an impression of Lyons as it presented itself to me”. Lyons is seen to combine all the negative features of English industrial towns, along with all the defects noticed by Dickens in foreign manufacturing cities: “for all the undrained, unscavengered qualities of a foreign town, seemed grafted, there, upon the native miseries of a manufacturing one”.19 Murray’s guidebook describes the wretchedly poor weavers who work in the silk industry. Among them are very many English who “are in the lowest state of degradation imbibing, in addition to their own vices, all the corruptions of the country to which they have migrated …”.20 These observations may account partly for Dickens’s image of the city as a graft of foreign miseries onto native ones. His description of the Alps seen from the Rhône river between Lyons and Avignon, depicting the vineyards, olive trees, churches with open towers, ruined castles and small towns and villages, remains conventional, in that it resorts to all the tropes of picturesque landscape prose, tinged with a hint of the sublime. Varied, rugged and full of oppositions of light and shade, the Alps and their surrounding scenery also strike Dickens by their contrasts in scale. Given his orthodox observations, his comments are, unsurprisingly, fairly banal: he finds this scenery a “beautiful” and “charming picture”.21

Screens and Superimposed Frames From Avignon onward, the pictures become more detailed and complex. In its description of Avignon, the next main stop after Lyons, Murray’s Handbook dwells on the Palace of the Popes and the atrocities committed within its precincts, and Dickens was clearly much inspired by these remarks. He chose to recycle one of the gruesome anecdotes narrated by Murray’s 1843 Handbook 22 and by another guidebook, that of a papal legate who had the great hall burnt down in revenge for the murder of his nephew. Dickens relates this story, supposedly translating it from a French history of the palace sold to him by his guide. To highlight its alleged French origin and presumed additional authority, the anecdote, introduced into Dickens’s general narrative as a “foreign” contribution translated into English, is separated from the main narrative by inverted commas.23

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Murray’s Handbook also spends some time giving details about the torture chamber and employing its French name alongside the English word to increase the effect of the description, a strategy adopted by Dickens in Pictures from Italy. Similarly, the account given by Murray of the torture chamber’s “funnel-shaped walls, contracting upwards … to stifle the cries of the miserable victims”24 reappears almost word for word in Dickens’s narrative which alludes to “La Salle de la Question … a rugged room with a funnel-shaped contracting roof … made of that shape to stifle the victim’s cries!”25 Like Murray, Dickens dwells at length on the instruments of torture and the exactions committed in the Palace by the Inquisition and, later, by French Revolutionaries. His imagination is fired up by the dungeon and its “dismal tower des oubliettes”, its “cachots” and its torture chamber.26 He turns the whole setting into a Gothic narrative complete with persecutions, a dark labyrinthine setting, a sinister guide and narrator, and a Radcliffean ending where the darkness of the past is finally dispelled by the brightness of the present. The episode culminates in an evocation of “les oubliettes” in which the description encapsulates all the main features of Gothic narratives: “Voilà les oubliettes! Subterranean! Frightful! Black! Terrible! Deadly! Les oubliettes de l’Inquisition!.27 Although Dickens seems to provide his readers with a very personal and idiosyncratic picture of Avignon which obliterates or skims past its other attractions to concentrate on the horror tales associated with the Palace of the Popes, he was in fact strongly inspired by Murray’s guide and merely embroidered upon its descriptions. The dramatic and sensationalist potentialities of these episodes of French history obviously stimulated his imagination, as did traditional British prejudices towards Roman Catholicism and continental forms of absolutism. Provence is depicted in Murray’s Handbook as an arid region with “a sky of copper [in summer], an atmosphere loaded with dust, the earth scorched rather than parched by the unmitigated rays of the sun, which overspread everything with a lurid glare”. A quotation within the guide also alludes to “the austere South of France, silent, burnt up, shadeless and glaring with houses all shut up”, in an atmosphere “thickened with the perpetual dust of habitual drought” and “roads, soil, houses, men, trees, animals, all partaking of the same universal dust”. 28 Dickens seems to have had these statements in mind when he depicts the dusty road between Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles with houses “shut up close” and vines “powdered white”, as well as “dust, dust dust everywhere”, not to mention the “country-houses of the Marseilles Merchants always staring white”, reminiscent of the “dusky buffy white” emphasised by Murray’s Handbook. This dust screen, which reflects the strong light and heat of the South of

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France, gives pictures of Provence a specific hazy quality. Furthermore, in Dickens’s description, the repetition of the word “dust” produces a similar effect to the recurrence of the word “fog” at the opening of Dickens’s later novel Bleak House (1852-53). In Pictures from Italy, dust is first included adjectively in the phrase “A dusty road it was”, which employs an inversion enhancing the adjective; then the word “dust” is beaten up again with the hammering of an epizeuxis, “dust, dust, dust everywhere”. This parallel leads us to wonder if the dust in Pictures from Italy, like the fog in Bleak House, may not provide a clue to the interpretation of the entire narrative, or at least of the part of Pictures from Italy devoted to Provence. This symbolic dimension may be contained in another key term of the episode, namely the word “staring”, applied to the “country-houses of the Marseilles merchants, always staring white”.29 The word “staring” can also be found in the opening lines of Dickens’s later novel Little Dorrit (1855-57), interestingly also devoted to a description of Marseilles with its “staring white houses”.30 In Pictures from Italy the verb “staring” is first used at the end of the opening paragraph of the description of Marseilles, to personify the country-houses in a typically Dickensian anthropomorphic approach. The verb “to stare” reappears further on in the extract, this time used literally in a description of the madhouse where “chattering madmen and madwomen were peeping out, through rusty bars, at the staring faces below”.31 In Little Dorrit, this process of staring and being stared at will become a major feature of the city since “everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there”.32 This universal stare emanating from humans and objects alike creates a sense of uneasiness. Starers are stared at in turn and this reminds the reader that the travellers of Dickens’s narrative are not just onlookers, they are also being looked at, and perhaps perceived in turn as a stereotypical British family. In keeping with the title, Pictures from Italy, some paragraphs of Dickens’s description of Marseilles compose small genre scenes equivalent to vignettes: the first paragraph could be entitled “Countryside around Marseilles”, the second “Prospect from the fortified heights”, the third “A Street in Marseilles”, the fourth “A Hairdresser’s salon”, and the fifth “the Port”. Some of these pictures are not merely descriptive, but form drafts of short stories inserted into the travel narrative. Shady individuals give the street scene in Marseilles a touch of mystery and adventure with its “crowds of fierce-looking people of the lower sort, blocking up the way, constantly”. Its lunatic asylum, at the heart of the city, could very well be the setting for a tale, as hinted at by a subject-verb inversion and a delaying syntax which keep the reader on tenterhooks: “In the very heart

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of all this stir and uproar, was the common madhouse”. However, the down-to-earth ending of the sentence, “common madhouse”, brings the reader back to ordinary reality with a bang. In the picture of the hairdresser’s salon, Dickens stages a hairdresser’s family around their shop window displaying “two full-length waxen ladies twirling round and round” in a scene which fluctuates between humour and the grotesque, as the corpulent hairdresser in drab slippers and cool undress, sits outside the shop with his legs stretched before him in “lazy dignity”.33 Marseilles’ Old Harbour is presented by Murray’s guidebook as “the sewer of the city … offensive from the filth which flowing into it, is allowed to stagnate in its tideless sea”. The guidebook points out that “the stench emanating from it at times is ... intolerable, except for natives”.34 Dickens remembers this when he mentions the “compound of vile smells perpetually rising from a great harbour full of stagnant water, and befouled by the refuse of innumerable ships with all sorts of cargoes: which, in hot weather, is dreadful to the last degree”.35 On the other hand, Murray’s guide praises the quays of the Old Harbour as “an agreeable walk presenting … an amusing scene of bustle and variety, Greek, Turkish and Neapolitan costumes”.36 Dickens also focuses on “foreign sailors of all nations” “in Turkish turbans, glazed English hats, and Neapolitan head-dresses, but he gets clearly carried away by sound and rhythm in his enumeration of clothes, colours, faces, and nationalities: There were foreign sailors, of all nations, in the streets; with red shirts, blue shirts, buff shirts, tawny shirts, and shirts of orange colour; with red caps, blue caps, green caps, great beards and no beards; in Turkish turbans, glazed English hats, and Neapolitan head-dresses.37

“Red shirts, blue shirts” is echoed by “red caps, blue caps”. “Buff shirts” forms an alliteration with “blue shirts”, and rhythm and sound also prevail in “great beards and no beards”. Marseilles and its surroundings gain extra depth through the superimposition of viewpoints and time frames. The landscape thus brought forth is made up of a succession of memories and of views taken from different vantage points. Dickens first adopts the perspective of a traveller going through Marseilles and its surroundings. He later provides a bird’s eye view of Marseilles from the upper part of the town: “the prospect, from the fortified heights, of the beautiful Mediterranean, with its lovely rocks and islands, is most delightful”. Memories of his first journey to Marseilles are completed by later reminiscences, as he interrupts the spatial and chronological sequence of events to indulge in the evocation of later stays in the city: “I was there, twice or thrice

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afterwards, in fair weather and foul”.38 One of these later visits was made after a brief trip to London halfway through his stay in Italy, a visit alluded to in more detail later in Pictures from Italy. He dwells in particular on his return to a spot where a hairdresser’s salon stands. The mannequins in the hairdresser’s window, only two-dimensional when first described in his narrative, become more complex in the next description which endows them with a third dimension that seems to bring them to life. The corpulent hairdresser was still sitting in his slippers outside his shopdoor there, but the twirling ladies in the window, with the natural inconstancy of their sex, had ceased to twirl, and were languishing, stock still, with their beautiful faces addressed to blind corners of the establishment, where it was impossible for admirers to penetrate.39

This overlapping of memories, signalled by the definite articles which replace the indefinite articles used when the sights were first mentioned, produce a cumulative evocation which gives depth to the places and objects thus described in small strokes. Later recollections shed light on and feed into former reminiscences, and Marseilles becomes coloured by the lyricism of memory, just as London does in Dickens’s novels. Nevertheless the city of Marseilles, however picturesque, remains associated in Pictures from Italy with dirt and inadequate sewage, dubious and somewhat threatening crowds, and rather lazy inhabitants: in other words, with typical British clichés of inhabitants of the Continent and especially Southern Europe.40 And this impression is confirmed by Dickens’s account of what he sees along the cornice road to Nice. La Grande Corniche, the coastal route which leads from the city of Nice towards Italy, also gains new depth as the Dickens family, “not being satisfied to have seen only the outsides of the beautiful towns that rise in picturesque clusters from among the olive woods, and rocks, and hills, upon the margins of the sea”,41 discovers them by road after having sailed past them the first time they went to Genoa. However, this new perspective produces mixed feelings in the travellers as they discover the misery and squalor hidden behind the picturesque appearances they had appreciated when they had admired Nice and its region from the sea. They are forced to admit that “[m]uch of the romance of the beautiful towns and villages on this beautiful road, disappears when they are entered, for many of them are very miserable. The streets are narrow, dark and dirty; the inhabitants lean and squalid”.42 In the various locations through which he passes, Dickens focuses on ordinary aspects of French life and scenery. As stated in the preface to Pictures from Italy, entitled “The Reader’s Passport”, he claims to ignore

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“famous [French] Pictures and Statues” already covered by John Murray’s celebrated guidebook.43 Instead, he prefers to focus on small details and anecdotes from everyday life, such as an animated clock in Lyons cathedral, which was exhibited to him by the keeper of the church, leading to a comic misapprehension on the author’s part: There was a centre puppet of the Virgin Mary; and close to her, a small pigeon-hole, out of which another and a very ill-looking puppet made one of the most sudden plunges I ever saw accomplished: instantly flopping back again at sight of her, and banging his little door violently after him. Taking this to be emblematic of the Victory over Sin and Death, and not at all unwilling to show that I perfectly understood the subject, in anticipation of the showman, I rashly said, “Aha ! The Evil Spirit. To be sure. He is very soon disposed of.” “Pardon, Monsieur,” said the Sacristan, with a polite motion of his hand towards the little door, as if introducing somebody—“The Angel Gabriel!”44

Another mechanical clock fascinates him in Strasbourg when he briefly passes through that city on his way to Paris and London, halfway through his stay in Italy. His enthusiastic description of the mechanical clock with its cock crowing the time takes clear precedence over his description of the Gothic cathedral itself.45 Rather than focus on churches and the famous works of art they contain, Dickens prefers to concentrate on popular forms of faith, such as the votive offerings in the Avignon cathedral which he describes at length, or on a procession which he and his family witness in Nice. In an almost provocative manner, or maybe by way of a parody of official guidebooks with their enumerations of and respectful reflections on paintings, he rather irreverently comments on the votive offerings in the Avignon cathedral: In one, a lady was having a toe amputated—an operation which a saintly personage had sailed into the room, upon a couch, to superintend. In another, a lady was lying in bed, tucked up very tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a tripod, with a slop-basin on it … One would never have supposed her to be labouring under any complaint, beyond the inconvenience of being miraculously wide awake, if the painter had not hit upon the idea of putting all her family on their knees in one corner, with their legs sticking out behind them on the floor, like boot-trees.46

In the same comic mode, Dickens prefers to depict the assembly of worshippers in the cathedral rather than its architecture or the religious rites being performed:

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On the whole, however, the Catholic faith shown by French people remains a sealed book to Dickens. He depicts Catholic practises from the outside, at best condescendingly, at worst sarcastically, as a set of incomprehensible or laughable postures and objects. Equally, while Dickens’s descriptions of landscapes and scenery become more complex during his journey through France, his portrayal of French people remains, strangely enough, like the Catholic faith just mentioned, largely stereotypical.

Stereotypical French People The depiction of French people in Pictures from Italy is indeed close to caricature. The family’s trip through France begins with an allusion to French soldiers and postillions restricted to their size, as Dickens mentions at the turn of a sentence in a humorous way that he is no more bound to explain why the English family travelling by this carriage, inside and out, should be starting for Italy on a Sunday morning, of all good days in the week, than [he] is to assign a reason for all the little men in France being soldiers, and all the big men postillions; which is the invariable rule … 48

Marcus Stone, who was chosen by Dickens to illustrate the 1862 Library edition, seems to have been inspired by this sally about the size of French men. However, the connection between his engraving and the text is rather a loose one, since the tall man looks more like a road sweeper than like a postillion. Dickens was struck by the size of French postillions’ jack boots which he claimed were so tall that the men sometimes had to be hoisted into them by friends. Interestingly, though this detail lends itself to caricature, Stone did not select it for his engraving, perhaps because his style, contrary to that of Phiz,49 was less akin to satirical drawing. The French courier, Louis Roche, who escorts the Dickens family across France is another humorous two-dimensional character in Dickens’s prose. He is summed up by his stoutness and, strangely, by the cucumbers he relishes and carries around with him. This gives him a grotesque and faintly obscene appearance. Indeed wherever he goes, he is constantly

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“picking up green cucumbers—always cucumbers; heaven knows where he gets them—with which he walks about, one in each hand, like truncheons”.50 He is also highly recognizable by his daily negotiations with inn-keepers, also reduced by Dickens to mere caricatures with a few salient features. Roche is not the only corpulent Frenchman to feature in Pictures from Italy. Apart from a few “bony shepherdesses”, French people no longer appear as the skinny population depicted by William Hogarth in his eighteenth-century caricatures. In Dickens’s pictures of France, the fat monks of Hogarthian prints have been replaced by thin curés, but many of the Frenchmen described are distinctly corpulent. Nevertheless, the “withered old women … intensely ugly … crooning together in by-corners” in villages and towns of the French Riviera are somewhat reminiscent of the ugly old women in Hogarth’s satirical print on the French entitled Calais Gate (1748).51 On the steamboat from Lyons to Avignon, the Dickens family notices among their travelling companions a “silly, old, meek-faced, garlic-eating, immeasurably polite Chevalier, with a dirty scrap of red ribbon hanging at his button-hole, as if he had tied it there to remind himself of something; as Tom Noddy, in the farce, ties knots in his pocket-handkerchief”.52 The comparison with a character in a farce emphasises the two-dimensionality of the Chevalier. Another striking character met along the way to Marseilles is the old lady who guides the family through the Palace of the Popes in Avignon: “a little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes”, whom Dickens immediately nicknames “she-devil” and “SheGoblin”.53 This unforgettable character even inspired a French translation restricted to the part of Pictures from Italy devoted to Avignon and entitled Le Farfadet d’Avignon, published more than a century later in 1983. Dickens wrote: She was alight and flaming, all the time. Her action was violent in the extreme. She never spoke, without stopping expressly for the purpose. She stamped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung herself into attitudes, hammered against walls with her keys, for mere emphasis: now whispered as if the Inquisition were there still: now shrieked as if she were on the rack herself; and had a mysterious, hag-like way with her forefinger … 54

In the boat taking them from Marseilles to Nice and quarantined because it is thought to carry wool from the East, Dickens and his family meet two other cardboard characters, a loquacious Frenchman and a sturdy Capuchin friar. They are later driven along the Corniche road by another clichéd individual, namely the exuberant half-French, half-Italian Vetturino.

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All these characters behave in a mechanical way. Their features are simplified and exaggerated and their actions predictable. They resemble stock characters from a comedy or a farce, a feeling increased by Dickens’s many comparisons with the theatre, exemplified in his comparison of a French market with a stage setting,55 or in his occasional use of quasistage directions as in the following scene of arrival in a French inn, a topos of travel writing presented in a new manner: “the door is opened. Breathless expectation. The lady of the family gets out”.56 The theatrical effect is strengthened by the use of direct discourse transcribed from the French and therefore even more idiomatic: “My Courier ! My brave Courier! My friend! My brother!”, as well as free direct discourse such as “Are the rooms prepared? They are; they are. The best rooms for my noble Courier. The rooms of state for my gallant Courier; the whole house is at the service of my best of friends!”. The stereotypical formulae articulated by these stock characters, added to the ironic intrusions of the travellerstage manager commenting on the scene, increase its satirical dimension: “The landlord of the Hôtel de l’Ecu d’Or, dotes to that extent upon the Courier, that he can hardly wait for his coming down from the box, but embraces his very legs and boot-heels as he descends”.57 Thus, contrary to eighteenth-century travel writers who, according to the critic Jean Viviès subjected national stereotypes to the test of experience,58 Dickens reverses the process, paradoxically using experience to create types which are hard to tell apart from some of the grotesque characters in his novels. It is as if he did not really want to see the French as they were and was content to either reproduce distorted English clichés or to create and spread his own stereotypes. In so doing, he contributed to hiding reality rather than to uncovering it, thereby reducing his traveller’s experience instead of expanding it.

Conclusion In short, anyone expecting a revelation from Dickens’s account of his first visit to France in Pictures from Italy will be slightly disappointed. Though he claims to offer readers another picture of France than that of Murray’s Handbook, he in fact derives many of his observations from the standard guidebook used by British travellers abroad. His vision remains prejudiced and somewhat external and superficial, as though he were deliberately holding back from what he saw and refusing immersion into French culture. This first trip across France is less an eye-opener on France than on Dickens himself as a traveller initially inclined to keep France and the French at a distance, thus protecting himself from their

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foreign influence. Nevertheless, his perceptions do become more subtle as he travels through France, and repeated visits to the same spots, as well and varied perspectives on these same locations reveal a better understanding of a country which was later to become his second home. Somehow, however, the main features of Dickens’s representation of France and the French will continue to be found in the rest of his work. The sketchy description of a dingy hotel in Dijon where Edith Dombey elopes with Carker to humiliate Mr Dombey in Dombey and Son, or the stereotypical descriptions of Lady Dedlock’s French maid Hortense in Bleak House, of Rigaud Blandois in Little Dorrit, not to mention of the French citizens and particularly of Monsieur and Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, are reminiscent of Dickens’s sketches of France in Pictures from Italy.59 Although his knowledge of the country had improved by the time he wrote these other works, his fictional representations of France and the French remained infused with clichés and British stereotypes. Whether Dickens could never quite overcome his national identity and the biases which went with it, or whether he wished to please his readers by giving them the stereotypical views of France which they expected, remains unclear. However, Dickens’s correspondence and his interaction with French people such as his landlord in Condette tend to tip the balance in favour of the second option. 60 For his part, and to quote David Parker in an article devoted to “Dickens Abroad”, Dickens, as a “Londoner at heart”, increasingly “strove to digest France … with a generous sympathy but also with a decent reserve”.61

Bibliography Briard, Edith. “Hortense, Rigaud/Lagnier/Blandois and C°. Dickens’s French Characters”. In Charles Dickens et la France, edited by Sylvère Monod, 25-34. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1978. Caron, François. Histoire des Chemins de Fer en France. Tome 1: 17401883. Paris: Fayard, 1997. Collins, Philip. “Dickens and French Wickedness”. In Charles Dickens et la France, edited by Sylvère Monod, 35-46. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1978. Dickens, Charles. Le Farfadet d’Avignon. Translated by Armand Vidal. Avignon: Librarie Contemporaine, 1983. —. The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Three 1842-43. Edited by Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.

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—. The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Four 1844-46. Edited by Kathleen Tillotson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. —. The Letters of Charles Dickens: Volume Five 1847-49. Edited by Graham Storey and K.J. Fielding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. —. Little Dorrit. 1855. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. —. Pictures from Italy. 1846. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. —. Pictures from Italy. 1846. Edited by Kate Flint. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Coste, Marie-Amélie. “Literal-minded British and Stereotypical Foreigners in Dickens: the Limits of National Identity and the Definition of the Personal”. In Dickens in Italy: Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy. Edited by Francesca Orestano and Michael Hollington, 205-17. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Edmondson, John ed. Dickens on France: Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing. Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Books, 2007. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Vol 2: 1842-1842. Philadelphia: J. B Lippincott and Co. 1873. McNees, Eleanor. “Reluctant Sources: Murray’s Handbooks and Pictures from Italy”. Dickens Quarterly 24, no. 4 (December 2007): 211-29. Monod, Sylvère ed. Charles Dickens et la France. Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1978. Murray, John. A Handbook for Travellers in France. London: John Murray, 1843. Parker, David. “Dickens Abroad”. In Charles Dickens et la France. Edited by Sylvère Monod, 15-24. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1978. Perdue, David. “Charles Dickens Page—Minor Works: Pictures from Italy”. http://charlesdickenspage.com/minor_works.html. Rem, Tore. “Urban Comparisons: translating Paris for London in Household Words”. http://ressources-cla.univ-fcomte.fr/gerflint/RU-Irlande3/rem . pdf. Thalmann, Liselotte. Charles Dickens in seinen Beziehungen zum Ausland. Zürich: Juris Verlag, 1956. Vanfasse, Nathalie. “Du Récit de Voyage à la Fiction: La Ville de Marseille dans Pictures from Italy et dans Little Dorrit de Charles Dickens”. In Lignes de Fuite: Littérature de Voyage du Monde Anglophone. Edited by Jean Viviès, 85-103. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2003. —. “Entre Récit de Voyage et Fiction: la Traversée de la France dans Pictures from Italy de Charles Dickens” . In Le Voyage dans la Littérature Anglo-Saxonne. Edited by Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay, 7794. Ivry Sur Seine: Editions A3, 2003.

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—. “Horror Tales”. Dickens Magazine 5, no. 3 (2009): 22-25. Viviès, Jean. Le Récit de Voyage en Angleterre au 18e siècle : de l’Inventaire à l’Invention. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1999. Watrin, Janine. De Boulogne à Condette, une Histoire d’Amitié : Charles Dickens, Ferdinand Beaucourt-Mutuel. Condette: J. Watrin, 1992.

Notes 1

For related discussions, see Marie-Amélie Coste, “Literal-minded British and Stereotypical Foreigners in Dickens: the limits of National Identity and the Definition of the Personal” in Dickens in Italy: Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy, eds. Francesca Orestano and Michael Hollington (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 205-17; John Edmondson, ed. Dickens on France : Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing (Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Books, 2007); Nathalie Vanfasse, “Entre Récit de Voyage et Fiction : la Traversée de la France dans Pictures from Italy de Charles Dickens” in Le Voyage dans la Littérature Anglo-Saxonne, ed. Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay (Ivry Sur Seine: Editions A3, 2003), 77-94. 2 Eleanor McNees, “Reluctant Sources: Murray’s Handbooks and Pictures from Italy”. Dickens Quarterly 24.4 (December 2007): 211-29, discusses the role of the handbooks as sources for Dickens’s Pictures from Italy. 3 John Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in France (London: John Murray, 1843), 22. 4 At his “Charles Dickens Page—Minor Works: Pictures from Italy”, David Perdue explains that Dickens employed Louis Roche, whom he referred to in Pictures from Italy as "the brave courier" to be their guide and make travel arrangements. Roche was a native of Avignon and proved to be invaluable (http://charlesdickenspage.com/minor_works.html). He is also mentioned in Kate Flint’s recent edition of Pictures from Italy (1846; London: Penguin Books, 1998), 188. 5 Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 263. Hereafter, Dickens, Pictures. 6 Flint, ed., Pictures from Italy, 188. 7 Dickens, Pictures, 263. 8 For more on comparisons between the two capitals, see Tore Rem, “Urban Comparisons: translating Paris for London in Household Words” at http://ressources-cla.univ-fcomte.fr/gerflint/RU-Irlande3/rem.pdf. 9 Dickens, Pictures, 351. 10 For further information see François Caron’s history of French railways, Histoire des Chemins de Fer en France. Tome 1: 1740-1883 (Paris: Fayard, 1997). 11 Dickens, Pictures, 263. 12 Ibid., 265. 13 Murray, Handbook, xxxiv.

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Dickens, Pictures, 264. Ibid., 263. 16 Ibid., 264. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 266-67. 19 Ibid., 270. 20 Murray, Handbook, 366. 21 Dickens, Pictures, 272. 22 Murray, Handbook, 447. 23 Dickens, Pictures, 280. 24 Murray, Handbook, 448. 25 Dickens, Pictures, 276. 26 Ibid., 275. 27 Ibid., 278. 28 Murray, Handbook, 429. 29 Dickens, Pictures, 281. 30 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1. 31 Dickens, Pictures, 282. 32 Dickens, Little Dorrit, 1. 33 Dickens, Pictures, 281-82. 34 Murray, Handbook, 476. 35 Dickens, Pictures, 281. 36 Murray, Handbook, 476. 37 Dickens, Pictures, 281. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 307-08. 40 For a more in-depth consideration of Dickens’s portrayal of Marseilles, see Nathalie Vanfasse,, “Du Récit de Voyage à la Fiction: la Ville de Marseille dans Pictures from Italy et dans Little Dorrit de Charles Dickens” in Lignes de Fuite: Littérature de Voyage du Monde Anglophone, ed. Jean Viviès (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2003), 85-103. 41 Dickens, Pictures, 308. 42 Ibid., 312. 43 Ibid., 260-61. 44 Ibid., 271. 45 Ibid., 350. 46 Ibid., 273-74. 47 Ibid., 273. 48 Ibid., 262. 49 Pseudonym of Hablot K. Brown, Dickens’s main illustrator from 1836 until 1860. 50 Dickens, Pictures, 262, 267. 51 Ibid., 312. 52 Ibid., 272. 53 Ibid., 274-75. 15

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Ibid., 275. Ibid., 269. 56 Ibid., 266. 57 Ibid., 266. 58 Jean Viviès, Le Récit de Voyage en Angleterre au 18e Siècle : de l’Inventaire à l’Invention (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1999), 41. 59 For discussion of the representation of these characters, see Briard, Edith, “Hortense, Rigaud/Lagnier/Blandois and C°. Dickens’s French Characters” in Charles Dickens et la France, ed. Sylvère Monod (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1978), 25-34. See also Philip Collins, “Dickens and French Wickedness” in Charles Dickens et la France, ed. Sylvère Monod (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1978), 35-46. 60 See Janine Watrin, De Boulogne à Condette, une Histoire d’Amitié : Charles Dickens, Ferdinand Beaucourt-Mutuel (Condette: J. Watrin, 1992). 61 David Parker,“Dickens Abroad”, in Charles Dickens et la France, ed. Sylvère Monod (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1978), 19. 55

CHAPTER SEVEN FAMILY VALUES VERSUS THE VALUE OF FAMILY: CARLYLE’S HISTORICAL WRITING OF THE 1850S NATHAN UGLOW

Introduction “The Guises” is a problematic part of Carlyle’s oeuvre. In part, this is because it was a very late edition to that oeuvre, having been first published, by Rodger L. Tarr, in 1981.1 This means that it was published only after most of the major formative studies of Carlyle’s work had been written and assimilated, and after the cultural tide had turned against its author. Subsequent writing on Carlyle has broadly neglected it. But the manuscript is also problematic because it seems both to have few obvious connections with Carlyle’s interests in his earlier work (there is a distinct lack of heroism in it), and it is overshadowed by the more significant achievements of his later work. However, as I will demonstrate, “The Guises” actually marks a significant turning point in Carlyle’s writing, revealing how the ideas on morality which he developed in his earlier work found a new mode of expression in his later work. This turning point will be the use of families as a focus for historical writing. Carlyle’s views on moral unity and his strong objection to the fragmentation of moral frameworks inherent in ideas of the bourgeois family led him to focus on the pre-modern family as a means of expressing inherent moral unity (whether of good or bad intent). The politicized nature of the pre-modern dynastic family makes it impossible to subdivide political, family, and individual moralities. Drawing upon scholarship by Rodger L. Tarr, which shows the links between source material for the Guises story and Carlyle’s much more

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substantial publication on Frederick II of Prussia, I will show how those links of content are strengthened by understanding the links of form between the two works, based on their usage of the pre-modern family. This leads to a more complete understanding of how the way in which Carlyle drew upon German and French Enlightenment traditions subtly changed during this period. His need to express the absoluteness of moral unity, through the lens of the dynastic family, leads him to synthesize the two traditions in a new way, so that Frederick becomes a son who emulates his father, rather than either modeling himself on him or rebelling against him. This emulation is a political process of recognizing and achieving his father’s aims, but through redefining his values and methods. This fits into the wider context of the 1850s, in which there was a decided trend away from the Romantic idea of the individual artistcreator opposed to society, and towards an appreciation of larger social structures and the social nature of our being.

The Guises Manuscript During the early 1850s, Thomas Carlyle wrote a short (thirty-five page) historical study entitled, “The Guises”. This manuscript, which he never sought to publish, charts the rise and fall of the Guise family: several generations of dukes, ministers, and cardinals. This family effectively ran France during the reign of the weak Henri II, but fell foul of Catherine de Medici, Henri II’s powerful wife. Carlyle’s story centres on Catherine’s bitter rivalry with the Guises and how, since Catherine was also mother to François II, Henri III, and Charles IX (and ruled as regent for the latter), this rivalry led to the series of savage civil wars that plagued France and Europe throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. In Carlyle’s telling, the story is a chronicle of inhumanity with little redeeming virtue on show. The Guises and their various rivals (Catherine and the leaders of the Protestant League) are all motivated by simple and un-reflective passions, such as the lust for power, jealousy, or revenge. As if part of some organised conspiracy to ideological corruption, the Guises and their rivals all translated their selfish desires into the language of universal causes: God, France, and Catholic Europe. Religion thus became a mere ideological screen for the individual wills and their aspiration to power. Carlyle obviously felt that the Counter-Reformation, in particular, enabled such abuse with its systematic mediation of divine truth through Leagues and Councils, though his criticism is distributed reasonably evenly across all denominations. For Carlyle, the story of the French wars of religion was a sordid parade of political expediency to the bitter end:

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the civil war only ends after the rival forces effectively implode. Thus, when Henri de Bourbon cynically converts to Catholicism to become King Henri IV, this compromise solution is not presented as a triumph either of virtue or insight. It is simply a measure of general weariness and the profound need for peaceful resolution of any kind. Carlyle includes a running commentary, both reflecting on what is happening and interjecting his own responses to it. These responses are in his notorious prophetic mode, bewailing the triumph of sin over justice and his tone is entirely jaded and pessimistic. There is one potential hero, James V of Scotland, but he dies young before he can really make his mark.2 After that nobody manages to display any capacity for self-reflection or to nurture their soul in order to grow or develop as a person—or, what matters more to Carlyle here, to nurture, grow, and develop their country as a fitting environment in which to foster human life. Carlyle’s charge of moral anarchy here could not be clearer, but I want to state the case for an equal measure of narrative anarchy. If the Guise family were morally corrupt, their story is no less corrupt at the narrative level. In terms of narrative order, the Guise family could only ever have offered a purely nominal point of unity through its concerted power struggle: the family was so extensive and spread out across Europe in such convoluted swirls of sons, brothers, cousins, nephews, and wives, and such like that it becomes hard to keep track of them all. The various family members actively involved themselves in every area of public life, each aspect of which Carlyle had to explain, and they did so severally at once. In conceiving and structuring his narrative Carlyle perversely seems to have played to, and played up, the very anarchy that seems both to thwart his narrative focus and also to frustrate his moral interests. Had Carlyle chosen to order his narrative around a heroic individual, his usual practice, he might have had both a moral exemplar and a tight narrative focus. But, instead, he deliberately chose to use a family as the unifying narrative device and this doomed his manuscript to moral and narrative chaos. It cannot really have been an accident or the result of ignorance that Carlyle linked moral and narrative anarchy—Carlyle never entered upon any historical project without fully surveying the terrain with great wariness beforehand. We cannot think that he was simply “caught out” by the way it happened to develop. He seems to collude with this centrifugal, ramifying force, rather than to resist it. Families seem to be central to his message, but what was that message?

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The Idea of the Family in “The Guises” The answer to this question lies in the type of family that the Guises represented. Crucially, the Guises exemplified a dynastic model of the family, not a bourgeois domestic one. The dynastic family was grounded in a personal concept of patriarchal rule. The patriarch (king, or, as here, faction leader) was the “father” of his people and this relation was a macrocosmic version of domestic morality. This patriarchal system employed a single moral code was based upon basic ideas of justice and fair dealing, which could be readily intuited by any individual and applied to all human actions and relations up and down the scale (family, social, and political). This code was strong because it was simple and it unified all areas of human experience. But the bourgeois family model challenged this moral monism, separating itself off from public morality. The bourgeois family was a private matter; the public world stopped at the front door.3 The rapid rise of the bourgeois domestic family model in the 1840s and 1850s must have been anathema to Carlyle, who was an ardent moral monist. Carlyle was always insistent that morality was a public project that could allow no dark corners or private enterprise zones. In “The Guises”, therefore, Carlyle should be seen as writing against the bourgeois model of the family rather than writing in support of heroic individuals.4 Carlyle’s other publications from the time show a similar shift in focus from heroes to social conditions. His Latter-Day Pamphlets, written during the first half of 1850, were pre-occupied by the apparent splintering of the public sphere into areas of technical specialism. Heroes are nowhere to be seen. What we do get is a protracted lesson on Carlyle’s “universal Sacrament of Divorce”.5 This aimed itself at several simultaneous acts of self-sequestration at the social and political levels: that of the family, but also at the levels of political governance and the administrative aspects of life. The simple and intuitive language of moral experience no longer applied to individual, social, or political action. It is this experience of alienation that created the negative conditions within which Carlyle’s more famous doctrine of the “cash-nexus” might apply. Here, the language of (bourgeois) family experience provides the central insight into broader (bourgeois) social reality. So, continuing his thematic concerns from The Latter-Day Pamphlets, “The Guises” was responding to (and here this means rejecting) what he saw as the disease of his age: the readiness to divide morality up into portions and to create a distinct theoretical moral code for each portion. Morality cannot brook such division: to parcel out morality is already to be immoral.

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Now we can see that by 1850 the family had become the central battleground for Carlyle’s entire moral vision. He was arguing on several fronts that the family and the state (the family writ large) needed to be governed by simple and intuitive concepts that were readily available to all, rather than intellectual constructs. Moral unity was, for Carlyle, our only hope of true democratic justice: preventing the sharp-dealing and the misuse of language for ideological deception that he always thought came with technical systems of governance or morality. Thus, from Carlyle’s perspective, it must have been the pre-modern nature of the political family that attracted Carlyle to the story of the Guises. Certainly, the public (non-private) nature of the Guise family could not have been more clearly signalled. The Guises’ marriages were an expression of that family’s political ambition, rather than sentimental or affectionate unions. Domestic affection is utterly absent, not just relegated to secondary or tertiary status, and political considerations unapologetically dictate the terms. Politics was just what such families did, and what such families did was invariably political. Carlyle disagrees with what goes on: he highlights the way in which children war with parents and siblings with each other, almost as a matter of course. They band together only if they need to war against someone stronger than any of them alone. But we must acknowledge that he also insists upon the rightness of the moral tone of voice in analysing this world. A couple of decades earlier, Carlyle had ended Sartor Resartus with a note to his reader that the book has been a “quarrel”, rather than a story.6 By this, he had meant something about the importance of such quarrelling for giving a moral airing to a subject. To avoid or deny such quarrelling was the greater and more insidious moral sin and the creation of a separatist “domestic morality” did just that. So, even though the Guise family offered no positive moral content, they were still moral subjects. And so, for Carlyle, the real unifying force for the manuscript was a moral one. In 1843 Carlyle had argued that the patriarchal medieval period was the simple alternative to the new patchwork morality. We faced a straight choice of past or present.7 But, a decade later, those simple alternatives had yielded to a more complex analysis of ideological effects. A simple return to the past was not really a live option for us moderns because our basic moral and social imagination had been scrambled and our social world re-programmed to think in terms of “the universal Sacrament of Divorce”. The name for this period of transformation that separated us from the medieval patriarchal social imaginary would be the “Renaissance”. Any attempt to get back to patriarchal moral purity could only be possible

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through first understanding how ideology had captured our moral and social outlook— and only then starting to un-ravel the diverse and varied effects of that ideological capture.

Carlyle and the Renaissance So, another significant cultural factor in play in Carlyle’s narrative is the identification and interpretation of the “Renaissance” epoch. This epoch was being carved out and defined during the 1850s, as the transition between medieval faith and modern separatism (nationalism, and liberalism).8 For many writers in Carlyle’s circle, the Renaissance was not treated as the glorious rebirth of human spiritual and artistic liberty, but very much treated as a catch-all term for a disastrous general tendency to ideological corruption and the hollowing out of religion. Religion was no longer a vital public force that tamed and disciplined the soul. It was now the passive field upon which individuals could realise their particular will. This is a narrative of the Renaissance as a fall from honesty and genuine interpersonal relationships. Carlyle’s “The Guises” places his thought at the centre of this new definition and interpretation of the Renaissance along such moral grounds. Before my essay gets into further specific arguments on this point, I would like to signal a couple of parallel instances that might help to situate his work of the early 1850s and to generalise the significance of the change I will be describing. Firstly, John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851-3), contemporaneous with “The Guises”, included an account of something that looks very like a generalised conspiracy to ideological corruption going on in the sixteenth century. Ruskin’s account helped to identify, define, and popularise the concept of a cynical, hypocritical Renaissance, evident in a thoroughgoing turn to selfishness and national politics.9 In his account of cultural activity in Venice, he argues that humane values got squeezed out between the new categories of the individual and the state, and the public sphere ceases to be the vital commons and becomes a place of mercantile exchange and the assertion of the self. Again, this is the patriarchal critique of the modern division and dispersal of morality: true morality demands a total vision of life, and the story Ruskin offers both charts and explains its increasing failure to get it. Secondly, Charles Dickens offers an interesting parallel with another contemporaneous work: Bleak House (1853). In the 1840s and 1850s Dickens actively played a part in fixing, publicising and celebrating the virtues of bourgeois domestic affection and Catherine Waters has recently charted his efforts with great care. But her account misses out his 1853

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novel, Bleak House.10 This is one of the works that Waters must be alluding to in her conclusion where she notes that Dickens could also present a dark side to family life. In Bleak House, the issue is not that families are corrupt; it is just that they do not function as self-enclosed fortresses clearly demarcating inside from outside. Some insistent metaphoric structuring in the novel places great emphasis on the things that permeate families: fog, money, wards, rumours, servants, infectious diseases, and so on. Bourgeois politics, family, and individualism claim to parcel out the world into distinct zones, but they do not really do that. There is critical value in showing how they fail by their own publicised criteria. By emphasising the way in which diverse communities and diverse social levels really do communicate and are not at all separate and distinct, Dickens is showing how the modern social set-up is broadly a matter of ideological perception. The connections are there, but we choose not to see them. Carlyle’s “Guises” manuscript also focuses on the failure of any family, even the powerful and dynamic Guise family, to become immune to fate. As the family spreads out into diverse fields of social action, the effects of accident and chance become more disruptive. The larger and more intricate the social network, the less successfully a simple ideological formula can apply. The sheer plurality of life thwarts any attempt to manage and master it. The Guise family were hubristic, but our faith in the modern state (nationalist and Benthamite) is no less so. Carlyle’s writing from the 1850s onwards squarely addresses itself to this issue. With hindsight, the 1850s seems a crucial decade for many such projects against the bourgeois family model and the divided system of morality that it implies (beyond those of the close Carlyle, Ruskin, and Dickens circle). It was from the 1850s, in the very midst of this bourgeois revolution itself that the Victorians could start to read an increasing number of books that criticised the new bourgeois morality from a variety of viewpoints. The work of Lewis Henry Morgan, Jakob Bachofen, Henry Maine, Fustel de Coulanges, John Fergusson McLennan, and Friedrich Engels all situated the new family ideal within a developing history of more archaic kin relations: affinity, consanguinity, cognate and agnate relations, and so on. Each study concluded that the bourgeois family model was non-natural and dangerously over-rationalised. Each sought a return to a more intuitive system of inter-personal relations, though this point is developed into some very different directions. I will start my analysis of what conclusions Carlyle drew from his reflections on the pre-modern family with a closer look at “The Guises” and then move on to an analysis of Frederick II of Prussia, a book that focuses in on the way the family is there represented

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as a kind of disruptive force, but one that can yet be tamed for positive development and progress.

“The Guises” as a Turning Point So, Carlyle identified the family as a new subject for his moral criticism during the writing of “The Guises” and this new subject neatly divides his work into early and late periods. Before “The Guises”, families had been purely incidental in his writings; after that work, families would function as the only viable lens for effective moral discourse. Families have no real role to play in his novel, Sartor Resartus (1831), in his histories of The French Revolution (1837) and Oliver Cromwell’s Life and Letters (1845), or even in his biographies of Friedrich Schiller (1823-4), and John Sterling (1851), where families might have been expected to feature quite prominently. After “The Guises” we have a more consistent focus on what links generations and what gets handed down through them. This striking shift might well have been obscured because Carlyle’s later career gets very little critical attention, and 1850 is pretty much where most of Carlyle’s readers stop reading. For many, this is the point that the dyspepsia takes control of him; the volume rises, and his comments become dangerously illiberal.11 The only modern edition of Carlyle’s Reminiscences was published in 1997 and there simply is no recent edition of Frederick II of Prussia. The analyses which follow aim to provide some foundation work for this unknown later Carlyle. The first problem in presenting “The Guises” as a major turning point is that Carlyle’s intentions in writing it are hard to recover. As a manuscript that did not result in any publication, “The Guises” is not a typical example of Carlyle’s historical writing. He left no direct explanation for its composition or of what he intended to do with it, when usually he was voluble about such matters. Even the dating of the thirty-five page document is a bit mysterious: uniquely in Carlyle’s oeuvre, we have no information at all about its research process or the time-frame of its composition. Usually, Carlyle was particularly expansive in his correspondence about such matters; in this case he was almost entirely reticent. The one (probable) allusion to it comes in a letter, where he describes a work that is like a penance: unrewarding, but something that must be got through (why?). The letter is dated 5 October, 1855; the day before the manuscript is end-dated. What we do know from Carlyle’s letters is that between 1851 and 1855 he was wracked with anxiety about deciding upon his next writing project. We also know that over this period he was edging ever closer to a study of Frederick the Great and not

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towards the study of the French Renaissance. Soon after 1855 Carlyle, with a kind of gloomy fatalism, officially committed himself to his vast study of Frederick the Great. Shut away in his sound-proofed garret room, it occupied his attentions all-but exclusively for the next decade and more. The period between 1851 and 1855 now gets seen as the inevitable lead up to that project. At first glance, “The Guises” manuscript seems irrelevant to this bigger project: a lesser annoyance as a prelude to, or distraction from, a greater one. But Rodger L. Tarr, who tracked down “The Guises” manuscript, and then edited and published it, has shown otherwise. He concluded that it not only was relevant to the bigger project in the manner of a preliminary sketch, but actually an integral part of its fabric. According to Tarr, the function of “The Guises” was to outline the background history of the Guise Duchy of Lorraine, which would be a key part of Frederick the Great’s story (Book Three contains the shared material).12 This would certainly fit with the several indications Carlyle had been making since as early as 1851 that he was already exploring the possibility of a study of Frederick the Great.13 Extending Tarr’s argument we can point to the central role that Voltaire plays in both works: his La Henriade was a key source for “The Guises”, and Voltaire’s relationship with Frederick is a major part of Frederick’s biography. This is signalled within the Frederick book to the extent that we could even argue that “The Guises” should be seen as a background study for La Henriade and the Frederick research as doing the same job for La Henriade’s author. On more secure ground we can certainly say that the life and works of Voltaire are really the glue that holds the work of this period together and with even more certainty, that there is real common ground in these research projects. So, if “The Guises” was never really a project distinct from the Frederick book and was simply part of his initial soundings, then Carlyle was not so much silent about it in his correspondence, as never aware of it as a distinct entity about which he might be silent. Against Tarr’s case, and my attempt to re-enforce it, would be the sheer volume of material that Carlyle considered for his Guises project that were clearly never going to be relevant to the bigger project. But Carlyle did produce similar “potted” histories and studies of various contextual materials for the periods prior to the French Revolution and to Cromwell’s career.14 Carlyle clearly liked to take a long run-up to his historical narratives. In this way, an additional case could be made for “The Guises” as being in line with Carlyle’s research practice. As it stands, Tarr’s commentary and annotations to “The Guises” benefit from his

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exacting knowledge of Carlyle’s own library holdings, and he points out that many of the key sources are shared between “The Guises” and the Frederick book.15 His case is built on the fact that the back-story of the Duchy of Lorraine is re-used, and also that several dictionaries of historical biography are common to both projects. Nevertheless, I want to produce a different kind of case from that which Tarr outlined, in order to support Tarr’s conclusions. While Tarr argues that the manuscript and the subsequent history of Frederick the Great both share historical content, I would like to argue that these two works also share an innovatory conception of historical form. The convergence of the two studies lies in the relation between content and form, rather than in content alone. What I mean by form here is entwined with Carlyle’s vision of the family unit and its relation to political society. Carlyle, as I have argued, was driven by his refusal of the new bourgeois domestic family, which he increasingly sees in the light of a fundamentally mistaken principle: he takes it as the very pattern of our deluded desire to create artificial self-enclosed entities. So, for example, he rejects nationalism as a kind of family unit writ large, and he rejects isolated individualism as a kind of family unit writ small. So, although Carlyle argues that the family unit is the truest form for history, the type of family he means is most certainly not the new bourgeois domestic model. Indeed, this seems to be why Carlyle’s attention to the family starts to appear in the 1850s when the bourgeois domestic model starts to become much more prominent than before. In this respect, the formal influence of families on Carlyle’s historical works from “The Guises” onward is found in the conscious and critical refusal of self-contained subjects or narratives. Therefore, to return to Tarr’s view on what Carlyle was doing with “The Guises” and how it relates to the Frederick book, my initial claim is that Carlyle’s interest was not just finding a way of recycling some hard-won research information, but finding ways of extending and developing critical concepts about the nature and value of history and doing so specifically by way of writing about families. This, then, is the reason why “The Guises” and The History of Frederick II of Prussia place families centre stage in a way they had not been in his earlier historical and biographical works. Having suggested that “The Guises” needs to be understood in relation to the broader development of Carlyle’s thought (political, social and historical), I will now go on to follow Carlyle’s specific discourse of the family, explaining first the reasons for its absence in his early work and then the reasons for its return to prominence in his later work. This will serve to re-trace Carlyle’s own struggle, starting with abandoned Guises

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project, toward a positive conception of reform. In order to explain quite how Carlyle’s lack of interest in the family was transformed into a preoccupation with it, I want to analyze his thought in terms of two significant European traditions: French sentimentalism and German Bildung. Ultimately, the shift in Carlyle’s attitudes toward the family is dependent upon the way he synthesized these traditions. Initially Carlyle favoured the German Bildung tradition, which he saw as modifying and correcting the earlier model of French sentimentalism. But, in his later work, the two traditions are more sensitively co-ordinated (or synthesized) with the critical balance tilting more toward the French attitude. Indeed, part of the reason for his choice of Frederick the Great as a subject for study was his own individual blend of German nature and French cultural leanings.

German Bildung or French Sentimentalism? The Modern Influences on Carlyle’s Conception of Family In one of Diderot’s innovatory domestic dramas, the hero, St Albin, refuses to make the kind of socially appropriate marriage that his wealthy father demands, preferring a love match with destitute virtue, represented by Sophie. St Albin justifies his choice by advancing the idea that he has dual heritage: a biological father (“the author of my days”) and a moral mentor (“the author of my virtue”): the first gave him life and the second shaped and helped to direct that life toward critical reflection.16 It is St Albin’s choice to commit himself to virtue that really ennobles him, not the social standing he has by birthright. Diderot’s overt message is that true worth derives exclusively from the choices of our moral self. To achieve moral autonomy requires a critical distance from all conventions (second-hand knowledge and practice) and a revitalized sensitivity to our natural sentiments. In other words, this play is structured as a conversion narrative: St Albin actively has to reject social convention in order to commit to virtue. Carlyle knew this play, Le Père de Famille (1761), well. While working to establish his career in the early 1830s Carlyle had read through Diderot’s works in order to produce a short biography of him (1833). Despite some ambivalence about Diderot’s atheism, he clearly accepted the Frenchman’s view that moral awakening dignifies (indeed, transforms) what is otherwise mere existence.17 Man, it seems, is born with the potential for virtue and only a conversion to critical self-awareness can save us from the delusions of social convention and activate that virtue. With Diderot,

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he would argue that inner experience, clearly felt and honestly analyzed, is the sole effective source of all personal, social, and political reform. Of course, rather than taking these ideas from his study of Diderot, Carlyle had seen them as merely confirming or anticipating views which he already held. Carlyle had already made just this point in his lectures on heroes (published as On Heroism and Hero Worship), where he repeatedly asserted that his heroes had never really felt part of their community: they thought and behaved like outsiders because they rejected the prevailing conventions and traditions as artificial and hollow. Rather than compromising and trying to assimilate themselves as best they can, Carlyle’s heroes struggled to uncover a more authentic basis for existence. Their hard-won insights and innovations then tended to be resisted by those around them precisely because they were novel. But truth will out, and their innovations duly became accepted as fundamental elements of social existence by society as a whole. But, in fact, Carlyle’s existing views were not quite the same as Diderot’s. Unlike Diderot, Carlyle at this stage in his career does not suggest that the family is the prime point of mediation for conventions and traditions: the tyrannical father is not the source of all power and injustice. This is clear when Carlyle discusses the relation between Diderot’s own life and work. When Diderot’s parents resisted their son’s own lovematch, Carlyle denies that this was a formative moment for Diderot the thinker and writer. In Carlyle’s account it is a mere anecdote: a pretext for airing thoughts that were properly independent of such incidents, not an event of any deep explanatory or formative power. In his biography of Diderot, his subject has to work and develop his talent; it is not created through a single decisive incident. So, on this evidence, Carlyle just does not see the family as an issue of any wider significance or resonance—yet. As an institution, the family might well have been regressive, but compared to political economy and other such enemies of moral autonomy, it was of little importance. The political sphere is the first level of analysis and at this point he finds the notion of politically-sanctioned individualism to be a more pressing, and more extreme, case. Indeed, I have already noted that there is wider confirmation of this point in that families have no real role to play in his early work, and yet his later work always takes the family as the central focus. With this in mind, then, Carlyle’s heroes are actually more akin to the orphan-protagonists that were the staple feature of the Bildungsroman genre. This does not involve a radical change from the kind of moral thought associated with Diderot; more of a shift in emphasis, factoring

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families out. This is the lens through which Carlyle was reading Diderot’s Le Père de Famille.

The Rejection of Family: Bildungsroman Like St Albin, the new heroes and heroines of Bildung also reflected an authorial preference for a specific type of learning: the struggle of isolated individuals to recreate themselves as moral figures in a world mired in out-moded and un-reflective thoughts and habits. But, self-evidently, the orphan-protagonists were quite deliberately not raised within a tight-knit family. This seems, ultimately, to be to their advantage, as they did not have to struggle against overbearing parents in order to achieve their moral autonomy. However, it also means that their choices become more complex and have to be more discriminating: the enemy of virtue is better able to disguise itself as rationality, parliamentary politics, railway shares, or any such tempting nonsense.18 In this way, the Bildungsroman genre does not share Diderot’s confidence that natural virtue is so easy to identify, or to live out. Diderot’s drama had all the simplicity of an allegory, abbreviating complex morality to the level of symbols. Sophie was the very figure of sentimental virtue, and had been, in fact, an overt allusion to the mentor-figure, Sophia (wisdom), familiar from countless classical cosmogonies and medieval allegorical tales. Furthermore, St Albin’s choice between Sophia and his father and uncle (“Le Commandant”), was simply a replay of the classic choice between virtue and vice.19 The drama comes entirely from asserting that choice and breaking with the family and St Albin had no doubts about his love for Sophia, or about her virtue. By contrast, the Bildungsroman genre sought to be more true to the grainy texture and quality of experience and rejected neat intellectual schemata. Moral awakening cannot involve a simple choice for a preconstituted and universally acceptable image of wisdom: it has to be a tendency of the soul toward some big thing that transcends images, ideas, words, and such earthly trash. It is therefore a constitutive factor for the Romantic sense of virtue that it lacks clear and specific form, and that it is something we have to work at identifying as well as realizing (despite our pessimism about ultimate success). In place of the Enlightenment belief in a moral faculty that is pre-attuned to true virtue, or the sentimental belief that the heart simply feels universal morality, the Romantics thought our moral promptings were both blank and mute; we experience them as an uncanny sense of being ill at ease, combined with a powerful, but ill-

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defined sense of yearning for something we have never yet experienced and never can experience. As a result, becoming moral now involves the ongoing project of discerning what wisdom looks like and how we can realize it. This is a first-person project of self-construction: Bildung. It is not a matter of taking on pre-constituted values. Consequently, this demands a hermeneutic process of blind testing: living, feeling a sense of failure, reflecting on that failure and trying again. Inevitably, this is a painful, frustrating, and risky process and a sense of confidence and direction is slow to build. The resulting Romantic procedure is therefore not that of simply looking at virtue and vice, and choosing between them. Choice must precede vision, as we must commit to the project of virtue even before we have a clear idea of what virtue is like. But once we have committed to virtue, experience then proceeds to shape and refine our initial faltering conception of virtue. This is the famous hermeneutic method of procedure. In short, in place of theoretical wisdom, we now have practical wisdom. Aristotle was the architect of practical wisdom and he differed from Plato precisely on this point: we learn how to live by living and reflecting upon lived experience, rather than upon logical ideas. But, where Aristotle had said we had to think and talk our way into our human nature, Carlyle suggests that we have to prune away the conventions and mental rationalizations that distract us from hearing the still voice of our natural duty to further the existence and conditions of Life. Thus, for Carlyle, but not for Aristotle, it makes sense that practical wisdom should stick close to the texture of actual life, rather than leaping off into mental patterns and schemata. Practical wisdom should be more biographical and less allegorical. Diderot had been just too Enlightened to see this. This individual and experiential path to a personal wisdom was essential because many Romantics, like the early Carlyle, no longer believed in Diderot’s Enlightenment idea of universal human nature. Individuals are morally distinct and unique. Off-the-peg moral guidelines do not suit everyone and each of us must find our own specific way of engaging with morality. It is only through ongoing reflection upon examples of moral practice (our own and that of others) that we can start to construct the practical morality that is specifically suited to us (the moral conviction that suits our capacities and engages our heart). John Ruskin clearly makes the case for the Romantic idea of the unique (lived) nature of our moral life and the unsuitability of by-the-book moral formulae that can guarantee moral success.20 Carlyle’s lectures on heroes had emphasized this Romantic point through his chapter titles (Hero as King, Prophet, Man of Letters, and so on): his heroes undertake unique projects, according to their natural

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dispositions and capacities. But in each case, they reject the prevailing way of doing things in that area and strongly commit to some as-yet undefined improvement. Forged in the school of pain, enduring isolation and rejection from the outside, as well as self-doubt and frustration from within, they make innovations which offer improvements to the prevailing situation, without ever being perfect embodiments of absolute truths. In fact, Carlyle overtly historicized his heroes, and made it clear that they had launched new ways of being, rather than finalized them. Thus, it was easier to agree that they were right in what they rejected than it was to agree that they were right about what they had put in its place. They headed in the right general direction, but they were better in departing than in arriving.

The Rejection of Bildungsroman: Carlyle Therefore we can say that, while Carlyle’s early work reflected some shared heritage with the French school of sentimental virtue, its defining qualities seemed to follow the German Bildungsroman tradition, which provided a more complex and ambitious analysis of sentimental virtue. Indeed, Carlyle’s critical achievement has consistently been seen and evaluated in terms of his importing of German ideas at the expense of his expansive work with French thought. From C.F. Harold, Ashton and Vida, impressive erudition and scholarship has honed the idea of Carlyle as a Germanist and played down the French influence.21 But, these major studies have focused almost exclusively on Carlyle’s early works, where it is most appropriate, and steered clear of the later works, where that appropriateness starts to falter. In Carlyle’s works from the early 1850s we can start to spot what looks initially like a straightforward reversal of this early position. Families do start to feature prominently in a series of works that starts with “The Guises”, includes the monumental The History of Frederick II of Prussia (1858-65), and culminates in his posthumously published Reminiscences (1881), which reflect at length on the influence of parents in moral development. Here, once more, stern fathers are the representatives of the hollow duties of society.22 Once more we return to a dramatic emphasis on making the break with the “author of my days” and trying to establish a new life with the “author of my virtue”. There is a renewed sensitivity to the true ground of a universal human nature, rather than on outmoded rules that are sustained only by the threat of force. Sons once again have to break with their biological family in order to do the right thing. We can push the connections with Diderot’s views, and the breaks

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with German thought, further: what “the right thing” is now seems to be much less of a mystery than it had in the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, Carlyle even gets close to arguing that our natural promptings are both virtuous and clear and our duties stand out for us, requiring little active interpretation. With “The Guises”, the long narrative of agonizing selfanalysis vanishes and it never really comes back: Bildung is just not the story anymore. Significantly, Frederick the Great provides a good example of this more-French-than-German synthesis. Frederick is, from the very start, extremely decisive, and seems to avoid soul-searching and doubt. He simply does not need to spend time identifying “the right thing to do”. Frederick’s struggle is related to working out how to get what he wants: the lessons he learns are pragmatic ones about timing and cunning strategy. Frederick becomes a master at maneuvering for position, outwitting his opponents, and striking at the most opportune time in order to succeed.23 In short, like Diderot’s St Albin, Frederick’s determination is transparent to himself, but he is always embattled both by his traditionalist father and by a chaotic, un-Enlightenened world. This is now the story once again. Perhaps the Bildung tradition had come to seem too subjective for Carlyle—so many stories of individuals creating their own private worlds. In the Frederick-version of the Bildung, narrative is given a French twist— the family unit is far more present in the narrative than any sense of self. Our birth family shapes us and we must fight to assert our right to create our own family, one that is more suitable or more natural. But this is to be done because getting it wrong is an affront to nature, rather than to any individual selfhood. Unlike the Bildung narratives, the family unit functions here like a legacy that we inherit and must reform in order to pass on in a better state. In this light it is important that making the family unit more suitable does not mean making it fit our own individual needs, but making it fit our the conditions of our epoch: making it a form of life that is fitting for whatever will need doing. Thus, with his later work Carlyle seems to take the Bildungsroman tradition close to Diderot’s position, and the first two volumes of the Frederick book, published together in 1858 and detailing Frederick’s savage upbringing, distinctly recall some of the central motifs of Diderot’s Le Père de Famille. But this will be no simple return to Enlightenment sentiment theories, either in content or in the form of the narrative.

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The Return of the Father I have already argued that Carlyle’s work on “The Guises” needs to be related to his rejection of the newly popular model of the bourgeois domestic family. That historical sketch served to un-pick the formal aspects of the self-enclosed family, society, and state. But Carlyle wearied of that project because since the Renaissance the pre-modern family was public and open to moral scrutiny, but that public morality had been stripped of any solid content and turned into ideological slogans and symbols for the new national dynasties and factions to exploit. In his study of Frederick the Great, Carlyle continues his critique of the modern bourgeois family and its separatist status, but he also seems to work out a more positive model of the family to oppose to it. At a first glance this positive reading of that book seems unduly optimistic. In Frederick II of Prussia, Carlyle still connects his depiction of the family to the “opening out” of the closed bourgeois model. The Prussian dynastic family is absolutely exposed to international politics and social trends.24 If anything, it is, in terms of both form and content, even more centrifugal than “The Guises”. Carlyle expands the scope even further and takes in Russia, Spain, Britain, France, Austria, and Prussia. The operative field of cause and effect relations has no obvious boundaries. Carlyle emphasizes how none of the main characters, such as the Prussian and Hanoverian monarchs, make much sense when seen from a narrowly national perspective. To tell the story of any single part (individual or nation) requires the explanation of ever-expanding circles of time and space. This is a vision of a world that cannot brook self-enclosure. Its interrelations are so numerous, complex and intricate that it is beyond mastery. Frederick’s experience is one of constant contingency: sudden and dramatic reversals and unexpected innovations. But, for all this, the story does not quite spin out of control: Frederick provides an individual point of anchorage of the type missing in “The Guises”. Crucially, Carlyle does not return us to the unity of the self-enclosed biographical subject in order to effect that anchorage. Frederick is presented as a biographical subject of a very different kind. The unity that Frederick provides is complex because his story offers the best perspective on his entire epoch. He is not a character within the story of Enlightenment Europe, but a privileged site through which its key features can best be understood and to the best effect upon us. A simple analogy might help here. For Dickens, the operative model of society was not the isolated castle but the coaching inn or hostel, run by a

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benign patron, who sets the tone for the environment of which he is never more than a part. Frederick functions like such Dickensian patrons, establishing an atmosphere and tone for the environment. The patron is the one who acts and reacts decisively against the constant turn of events to maintain that tone as a point of equilibrium. The patron often tends to be the owner of the specific environment, but even where they do own that society (as Miss Havisham owns Satis House, and as Frederick is formally the king of Prussia) their authority is less a matter of ownership and more about the work of sense of duty and care they contribute to maintaining that tone. In this way, Frederick is not an individual on the Romantic rebel variety, cut out from the world and fortified against it, but an individual who functions like a hostel or coaching inn. This hostel-model of individuality is Victorian in its openness to both the past and the present— and so Frederick is hospitable both to his Prussian heritage and to the world of strangers around him. In writing about Frederick, Carlyle cannot avoid writing about the whole of his contemporary Europe and the whole of the past that has constituted that contemporary situation. Thus Frederick comes to epitomise both Prussian history and his own Enlightenment era, summing up and completing paths and re-interpreting historical and cultural lines of development. To put it simply: Prussia and the Enlightenment are most instructive when seen in the Frederick-way. Clearly, then, this is not an example of history as impartial overview; this is history as immanent and perspectival. Frederick is not an individual within a family; the whole family and set of social relations is condensed and animated through him. He is presented as the very spirit of Prussia, and Prussia as part of the fabric of European power. Frederick represents continuity combined with rupture, or rather it is through breaking with his father that he becomes most like him. So, this is why the later Carlyle develops his interest in families. He has invented his own positive model of what a family means and implies. He sees the relation of fathers and sons, and why he sees that relationship as containing a hitherto unsuspected potential for the complex mediation of both tradition and present need. This solution synthesizes elements of the French tradition he noted in Diderot’s family dramas, along with elements from the German Bildungsroman tradition with which modern critics so associate him. Carlyle’s synthesis of these rival traditions is presented as his moral message. On the one hand, sons should not just rebel against the paternal rule in order to develop their own life-path, one open to the present only because they have broken away from the constraints of the past. The Diderot pattern is out-dated, though Carlyle kept the idea of an intuitive moral code prior to any social organisation. On the other hand, sons

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should not simply deny their family heritage either, and engage with the present world in a solipsistic way. This Romantic Bildungsroman tradition was out-dated too as it was too egoistic and always threatened to dissolve any objective moral bonds. Still, Carlyle kept from this the idea of the creative potential for effective moral struggle to implement changes on a specific historical society. Instead, the right synthesis of these traditions is that sons emulate fathers: interpreting the essential values from the past and refine new ways of delivering on those values for the present and the future. The role of the son is to adjust his heritage with the needs of the present, adjusting the dictates of the moral sense within a historicised world. The opening chapter of the vast History of Frederick II of Prussia emphasises this project of emulation. Frederick the Great is really Frederick II, the son of his father Frederick I. Frederick did better as a ruler than his father because he understood how to move beyond simple oppositions to a more blended and subtle synthesis of Prussian decisive and ruthless passion with French qualities of grace, politesse, and savoirfaire.25 In terms of the historical content that Carlyle flagged up, Frederick’s blend of French culture and German directness is the key to his success. The relation between Frederick the son and Frederick the father thus ends up somewhere between acceptance and rejection. Frederick I dreamed of making Prussia powerful; Frederick II did just that. He was better at being Frederick I than Frederick I was. Frederick II builds his new insights by sifting and revising his father’s own approaches in line with his own experiences and the needs of the times. It is, notably, on this basis that Frederick II achieves all the ancestral goals of Prussian selfassertion on the European stage that Frederick I (and his ancestors in turn) had set for their country. But where Frederick I had failed to realise these goals because he was just too direct and headstrong, Frederick II took that stubborn and ruthless character and made it patient, enduring, and masterfully strategic. And all this is precisely the relationship Carlyle paints in his (posthumous) Reminscences between himself and his own father. His own father was a man of decisive action rather than a man of words, and a man in love with truth more than in love with people. Carlyle’s simple, decisive morality is entirely his father’s. To this, he has added the words and discursive intelligence to popularise this message. He presents himself as continuing and realising what was most essential about his own father: I can see my dear Father’s Life in some measure as the sunk pillar on which mine was to rise and be built; the waters of Time have now swelled up round his (as they will round mine); I can see it (all transfigured) though

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I touch it no longer. I might almost say his spirit seems to have entered into me (so clearly do I discern and love him); I seem to myself only the continuation, and the second volume of my father.26

Thomas Carlyle has learned from James Carlyle’s example the true spirit of justice and has developed beyond and against his father the wise use of that justice. This difference is rightly stated to be the very mark of his piety. Significantly, Carlyle’s phrasing and his description of suppleness developed in the expression of strength echo the analysis of Frederick as continuation of his own father: [H]ere is a new second edition of a Frederick, the first having gone off with so little effect: this one’s back is still unbroken, his life’s seedfield not yet filled with tares and thorns: who knows but Heaven will be kinder to this one? Heaven was much kinder to this one. Him Heaven had kneaded of more potent stuff: a mighty fellow this one, and a strange; related not only to the Upholsteries and Heralds' Colleges, but to the Sphereharmonies and the divine and demonic powers; of a swift far-darting nature this one, like an Apollo clad in sunbeams and in lightnings (after his sort); and with a back which all the world could not succeed in breaking—Yes, if, by most rare chance, this were indeed a new man of genius, born into the purblind rotting Century, in the acknowledged rank of a king there,— man of genius, that is to say, man of originality and veracity; capable of seeing with his eyes, and incapable of not believing what he sees—then truly—27

Significantly, there is implicit in this a major transformation of Carlyle’s notion of the hero, and Carlyle opens the book calling Frederick “a questionable hero”. Unlike Carlyle’s earlier heroes, then, Frederick is presented as utterly situated and historicised: he is in and among his fellow men, learning from them, reacting to them, and struggling to impose his will upon them. Of course, Carlyle could never bring himself to love the mechanical, rational, and procedural eighteenth century and his criticisms of Frederick often focus on his being so much a man of his time. But it is not the fact of Frederick so much as his spirit that Carlyle responds to. It is not our task to imitate Frederick as to emulate him—we should learn from him how to be men of our own time. Unlike Carlyle’s previous heroes, Frederick did not invent or inaugurate anything: the ways of the world were the same after him as before. He is no longer an isolated genius whose understanding of truth allows him to transcend his social situation and to inaugurate a new epoch (like Hegel’s “world historical individuals”). His is less a story of divine inspiration and

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lasting achievement, than one of constant struggle: as long as he kept afloat on the seas of European politics, Prussia lived and could prosper. Indeed that is the point Carlyle makes about Frederick—he did survive and Prussia did prosper, gathering together parts ceded in previous reigns and conquering new territories by force or cunning and assimilating and securing them through rational institutions and shared social practices. Frederick, therefore, is presented as a model of human attitude: a mode of being (seeing and doing aright); not as a model of achievement or inauguration. He simply exemplified the power of the human will to confront history and to engage productively with it. Rather than making a difference, Frederick was the difference. This shift from Romantic individualism to social engagement reflects a general trend of Victorian thought in the 1850s when social improvement was often seen as the pre-condition for individual salvation. Most Victorian “prophets” and “sages” had given up on solutions that were simple, clean, and swift. Now, social change meant hard work, re-claiming ground and holding it for humanity. Utopian dreams yielded to patience and conviction became the key structuring quality of the soul, rather than sudden grace. For Carlyle, as for Dickens, Arnold, Tennyson, Eliot, and many others, this was a matter of teaching people to have the right attitude, not just about providing them with good housing and plumbing (though this sort of thing would obviously follow on from having the right attitude). True reform comes from and starts with the reform of the heart, opening it out onto others, not from legislation or the provision of liberal institutions. These should conform to the heart’s reforms, not attempt to prescribe for them.

Conclusion Now we have come full circle and we can reunite this late version of Carlyle’s heroism with his idea of the pre-modern model of the patriarchal family. What Frederick learned is that family means more than just passing on fixed conventions, and that if it does nothing more than this, then Diderot’s story of rejecting the “father of our days” does apply. But he also learned that family likenesses are cunning and persistent. Frederick did not actually break with his father in the end: instead, he completed him, becoming the man that his father could only aspire to be and implementing the grandiose vision of Prussian society that his father had envisaged, but failed to deliver. Frederick could only become a better version of his father by breaking with his father’s traditionalist ways and,

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devising through Bildung-style reflection on his own experience, more flexible methods for securing his ancestral objectives. In “The Guises”, Carlyle offered a vision of the dynastic political family as a moral disaster, but, in doing so Carlyle was certainly not casting an implicit vote for the new alternative: the bourgeois domestic model of the family. In fact, a wider contextual study of his conception of the family suggests that he was probably using this older model of family relations to unsettle and de-familiarise the newer notion of the bourgeois family, among other things. Crucially, then, “The Guises”, that penitential work, was not his final word on the matter; it marked a stage in Carlyle’s move toward finding an acceptable version of the family, one which would ultimately blend some seemingly contradictory elements from the older tradition (openness to strangers and moral existence) and from the newer tradition (the family as the exemplary pattern of human relations). In this final state Carlyle lost some of his idealism and found himself forced to engage more earnestly with frustrating human fallibilities. This was the cause for his gloom: he had outgrown naïve optimism and had come to accept that life was sheer toil. The History of Frederick II of Prussia was a slog for him, not just because it was a vast amount of work, but the implication of that work was that slog is a fact of life. Heroism means getting involved, not standing aloof. The task of “The Guises” within this developmental arc was, I have proposed, to show how families could not enclose upon themselves as a sealed domestic unit, even where they might want to. But it was also about showing how the failure of sequestering the family from public life established an analogous prohibition on acts of self-enclosure at the political and the individual level. Its point was to be frustrating and confusing; to show that reality (applied moral labour) was multifaceted, dense, and irredeemably complex. Thus, Tarr was right in noting that material and resources that were shared between “The Guises” and the Frederick book, and uniting the projects at this level. But equally important is the way in which Carlyle’s changing engagement with the concept of the family allowed him to express his themes through The History of Frederick II of Prussia in a way that was impossible for him to do through his short story of the Guises.

Bibliography Ashton, Rosemary. The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

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Bossche, Chris R. Vanden. Carlyle and the Search for Authority. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1991. Bullen, B. The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Carlyle, Thomas. Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reigns of James I. and Charles I . Edited by Alexander Carlyle. London: Chapman and Hall, 1898. —. Reminiscences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. —. The Works of Thomas Carlyle. Edited by H.D. Traill. 30 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99. Culler, A. Dwight. The Victorian Mirror of History. Harvard, Mass.: Yale University Press, 1986. Diderot, Denis. Le Drame Bourgeois: Fiction 2, Le Fils Naturel, Le Père de Famille. Edited by J. and A.M. Chouillet. Paris: Herman, 1960. Fielding, Kenneth J. “Justice to Carlyle’s Memory: The Later Carlyle”. In The Carlyles at Home and Abroad: Essays in Honor of Kenneth J. Fielding, edited by David Sorenson and Rodger L. Tarr, 1-14. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Gay, Peter Gay. The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud, vol. 4. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. Giddens, Anthony. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, & Eroticism in Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Harrold, C.F. Carlyle and German Thought, 1819-1834. Yale: Yale University Press, 1934. Lane, William Coolidge. The Carlyle Collection: A Catalogue of Books on Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great Bequeathed by Thomas Carlyle to Harvard College Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1888. Lasch, Christopher. Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. Morrow, J. “The Paradox of Peel as Carlylean Hero”. The Historical Journal 40 (1997): 97-110. Ruskin, J. The Works of John Ruskin. Edited by E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn. 39 volumes. George Allen: London, 1903-1912. Tarr, Rodger L. “‘The Guises’: Thomas Carlyle’s Lost Renaissance History”. Victorian Studies 25 (1981): 7-80. Vida, Elizabeth M. Elective Affinities: German Authors and Carlyle —A Study in the History of Ideas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Waters, Catherine. Dickens and the Politics of the Family. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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Notes 

1

Rodger L. Tarr, “”The Guises’: Thomas Carlyle’s Lost Renaissance History” Victorian Studies 25 (1981): 7-80. The original manuscript is at the Bibliothèque Nationale (as B.N.F., Anglais 144). 2 James V’s story and Carlyle’s lament appear on 16-18 of Tarr, ‘“The Guises”’. 3 Three interestingly different broad-brush approaches to this complex phenomenon are: Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud, Vol.4 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), and Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, & Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). 4 The death of Robert Peel in June 1850 seems to have shaken Carlyle’s belief that the kind of heroes he had been calling for were ever going to turn up. On Carlyle’s vision of Peel as a modern hero, see J. Morrow, “The Paradox of Peel as Carlylean Hero”, The Historical Journal 40 (1997): 97-110. 5 The “universal Sacrament of Divorce” is named and described in “Model Prisons”, the second pamphlet in the series and published on 1 March 1850. The Latter-Day Pamphlets were to be a running commentary on social matters during 1850, particularly commenting on the privatization of public morality by the cashnexus and other such forces. One pamphlet was written and printed for sale each month until the series stopped abruptly with “Jesuitism”, which he was writing at the time of Peel’s death. They were gathered and published as a single volume in 1851. 6 “Quarrel” is, in fact, the final word of (and on?) that novel. 7 A reference to the 1843 text, Past and Present. In the 1840s British medievalism did offer itself as a simple choice, but during the 1850s the more complex model I am outlining replaced that initial optimism. 8 A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (Harvard, Mass.: Yale University Press, 1986), and B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth -Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 9 Reciprocal influence was also involved. In this work, Ruskin had been experimenting with Carlyle’s “prophetic” tone and voice and social criticism. Carlyle speaks of his plagiarism of Ruskin’s ideas at this time (letter: 23.01.55), and Ruskin appended a discussion entitled “Plagiarism” to his Modern Painters, Vol. 3 (1856), primarily aimed at refuting his use of Pugin’s ideas, but actually discoursing at length on his near-total debt to Carlyle’s influence. 10 Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Waters nuances her account in the conclusion and notes that Dickens could present the dark side of family life. I would see Bleak House (1853) in this way (Waters omits it) and Dickens wrote this book when Carlyle must have been working on “The Guises”. 11 Kenneth J. Fielding has highlighted the extent of this neglect of Carlyle’s later work in his “Justice to Carlyle’s Memory: The Later Carlyle”, in The Carlyles at

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 Home and Abroad: Essays in Honor of Kenneth J. Fielding, ed. David Sorenson and Rodger L. Tarr (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 1-14. 12 Carlyle divided the work into twenty-four books, which were bound in various volume sizes. My references to this text will give the book and chapter number first followed by the volume and page number in H.D. Traill’s “centenary edition” (London: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99, in 8 volumes). The shared material, or what little there really is, is in Book 3, chs.7-12 (Frederick, 1: 213-51). 13 It is actually quite hard to find a stage in Carlyle’s life when he was not already projecting a study of Frederick (the same is true of Cromwell). 14 The studies of early seventeenth-century British history are gathered together as Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reigns of James I. and Charles I, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1898). The literature and culture of the French Enlightenment were preoccupations of Carlyle’s early essays. 15 Shortly after his death Carlyle’s Frederick-library was catalogued, edited, and published: William Coolidge Lane, The Caryle Collection: A Catalogue of Books on Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great Bequeathed by Thomas Carlyle to Harvard College Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1888). Why were Carlyle’s books in Harvard? Charles Eliot Norton, of Harvard, was Carlyle’s executor and had, by 1888, already published several collections of Carlyle’s correspondence. 16 Diderot, Le Père de Famille (1758). These phrases were fairly widespread in Enlightenment France. 17 Carlyle’s biography includes a specific discussion of Le Père de Famille. 18 I am referring to examples from Carlyle’s 1851 Latter-Day Pamphlets. 19 Diderot translated Shaftesbury’s extensive discussion of this motif of moral philosophy (Hercules’ choice) in 1745, around the time of his own marriage against his father’s wishes. Carlyle alleges that this personal experience was the model for this drama. 20 Ruskin makes this point clearly in “Modern Education”— an appendix to The Stones of Venice, Vol.3 (1853). 21 C.F. Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought, 1819-1834 (Yale: Yale University Press, 1934); Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), and Elizabeth M. Vida, Elective Affinities: German Authors and Carlyle —A Study in the History of Ideas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 22 In his study of the development of Carlyle’s thought, Carlyle and the Search for Authority (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1991), Chris R. Vanden Bossche uses the heading “The Return of the Father” to cover the post-1850 period of Carlyle’s career. 23 The notorious military emphasis in this book is often both overstated and then ritually denounced as militaristic, but it is perhaps also worth reading it as an exemplary instance of this pragmatic and contextual morality, sensing ways to

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 advance the cause of a moral position held with conviction. This general position Carlyle shares with most Victorian literary humanists. 24 Frederick the Great’s father tries to protect his family from social forces he does not like (mainly French culture) and he literally locks his wife up in a tower. But for Carlyle this is an example of the ideological denial of the fact that his family is already exposed to such forces. His attempts at sequestration and self-enclosure are notably both for their intensity and their utter failure. 25 Carlyle’s structure here seems to presage Matthew Arnold’s later demand that we better synthesise Hebraic and Hellenic attitudes. 26 Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences (1881; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 38. 27 Thomas Carlyle, Frederick, vol. I, ch.2.

PART II: ASSOCIATION – COMPARISON, CONCILIATION, COLLABORATION

CHAPTER EIGHT FAITH AND THE FRENCH: ANGLO-CATHOLICISM IN THE ANGLO-FRENCH HISTORICAL NOVELS OF CHARLOTTE M. YONGE ROSEMARY MITCHELL

Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Chaplet of Pearls (1868), and its sequels— Stray Pearls (1881-83) and The Release (1896)—constitute a significant part of her large output of historical fiction and non-fiction. Although best known as the author of domestic realist fiction, it is evident that Yonge played a significant role in the creation of Victorian historical culture: in her 1965 essay, “The Other Miss Yonge”, Alice Fairfax Lucy argued that Yonge “has a strong a claim to be remembered as an interpreter of history as of her own century”. 1 As Susan Walton has pointed out, although Yonge was “involved throughout her life in numerous varieties of history writing … its significance has been downplayed even by her first biographer and friend Christabel Coleridge”. 2 Recent scholarship is beginning to explore more fully her considerable output of historical novels and textbooks, mainly for children and young adults.3 This chapter will consider what might be called her Anglo-French novels: novels set both in England and France, involving the Anglo-French dynasty of the Ribaumont of Bellaise in Normandy and Walwyn in Dorset. The focus will be on Yonge’s use of three hundred years of Anglo-French history to articulate her own religious position and that of the Anglo-Catholic community to which she belonged. Like many devout Victorians, Yonge used historical representations to negotiate and define her theological preferences, and to validate the church party to which she belonged. Indeed, Yonge’s use of the longue durée to establish an Anglo-Catholic past can be compared and contrasted with the historical novels of the low church Evangelical Emily Sarah Holt, which construct “an explicitly

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Protestant and reactionary history of Britain through fiction in order to oppose the dangers of both Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism”.4 Yonge’s own religious position and her role in promoting and recording the Oxford Movement has been explored in Barbara Dennis’s 1992 critical biography, but although it offers a wide survey of Yonge’s Anglo-Catholic beliefs and activities, and their representation within her domestic fiction, no attention is given here to her historical texts.5 Susan Walton’s excellent and sophisticated analysis of the production of her textbook History of France (1879)—one of several such works, this one under the autocratic editorship of E. A. Freeman—draws attention to the fact that her religious beliefs “impelled her to disseminate a particular Anglo-Catholic slant on the national story”, but its focus is primarily on her non-fictional historical writing and the gendering of historical discourses in the mid-Victorian period. 6 However, Yonge’s use of historical fiction to define her own religious stance, and to legitimate the Oxford Movement by constructing for it a spiritual ancestry or apostolic succession, has been explored elsewhere. In an article entitled “The King, the Priest, and the Armorer: A Victorian Historical Fantasy of the Via Media”, Maria Poggi Johnson argues that Yonge’s historical novel, The Armourer’s ‘Prentices (1864) offers “an ambitious, elaborate, and imaginative apology for the via media of the Anglican church”, in which Yonge suggests that the Church of England “in its doctrine and practice, represents a pure and authentic Catholic Christianity, a middle way between the excesses and corruptions of Romanism and Protestantism”.7 Johnson’s central thesis—that Yonge is defining through the plot and characters of The Armourer’s ‘Prentices, a via media through the extremes of sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism and Calvinistic Protestantism—is a convincing one. In this chapter, it will be extended to Yonge’s AngloCatholic novels, which, it can be argued, used not only the English past but French history, too, to construct a continuous history for the Oxford Movement and to validate its theological position. While Johnson has recently extended her analysis of Yonge’s historical articulation of the Anglican position to include a discussion of The Chaplet of Pearls, she focuses largely on the early English sections of the novel; nor does she discuss any of the later Anglo-French novels which were its sequels.8 The comparative element of Yonge’s historical fiction is therefore clearly ripe for consideration: as Yonge herself argued in her 1871 Parallel History of France and England, “nations who have always been so closely intermingled, for mutual evil or good, require something more detailed”.9

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The Chaplet of Pearls (1868) One of the earliest chapters of The Chaplet of Pearls—chapter three— serves to establish the English Anglican via media which is to stand in contrast to the extremes of Roman Catholicism and Calvinistic Protestantism embodied by most of the French characters. An English family hold a council to discuss the problem of the child-marriage of Berenger de Ribaumont to his relative Eustacie, representatives of the rival French houses of the Black and White Ribaumont. Berenger’s father—a gay young French courtier who became a particularly austere Huguenot (French Protestant)—has died many years before, leaving the boy in the care of his English mother’s family, the Walwyns of Hurst Walwyn. For Yonge, the Walwyn household is emblematic of the Anglican middle way established by the Elizabethan Settlement of 1558. On desks in Hurst Walwyn Hall are a copy of the Bishops’ Bible10 and the authorised Prayer Book, and Berenger’s grandfather, Sir William Walwyn, is both a knight and a scholar “who had shared the friendship of More and Erasmus”, while his wife had been “the friend of Margaret Roper and her sisters”.11 This description clearly identifies the couple with the learned Catholic reformers of the pre-Reformation period—the best, in other words, of preReformation Catholicism. This pre-Protestant elder generation is completed by a final character, Lady Walwyn’s sister Cecily, a former nun turned out of her convent at the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, and received at Hurst Walwyn. Yonge continues to tell us: There had she continued, never exposed to tests of opinion, but pursuing her quiet course according to her Benedictine rule, faithfully keeping her vows, and following the guidance of the chaplain, a college friend of Bishop Ridley, and rejoicing in the use of the vernacular prayers and scriptures. When Queen Mary had sent for her to consider of the revival of convents, her views had been found to have so far diverged from those of the Queen that Lord Walwyn was thankful to have her safe at home again; and yet she fancied herself firm to old Romsey doctrine.12

This description of Cecily’s religious history neatly articulates the Anglican via media: she is seen as both in favour of reform through her endorsement of the new vernacular scriptures, her adherence to a chaplain close to the Protestant Marian martyr Ridley, and her divergence from the more aggressive Roman Catholicism of Mary I. But she is also a representative of the Catholic tradition of monastic celibacy. The Walwyn household represents the mean between Catholic and Protestant extremes, a sort of progressive evolution which embodies the best of both.

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Accordingly, it is possible, Yonge tells us, for Berenger—when he had arrived from France as a boy—to go “at once from mass at Leurre to the Combe Walwyn service”. His Calvinist convert father had taken him to a Huguenot service, but he had found “its very fervour familiar and irreverent” and had felt that the mass at Leurre was preferable to the French Protestant service. 13 Clearly, he is a fellow-traveller on the via media, who immediately finds himself at home in the Walwyn household. Acting as counterfoils to this Anglican golden mean are the extremes of French religious controversy, embodied most evidently in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, when the court Catholic faction targeted French Huguenots and in particular Admiral de Coligny, whose influence on the young king Charles IX was considered dangerous. The assassination of the Admiral was followed by the wholesale massacre of Parisian Protestants by Catholics. Yonge’s hero, Berenger, becomes involved in this event when he travels to France to arrange the annulment of his child-marriage. Arriving at the French court, he discovers that the polarised religious factions are represented in the king’s banqueting room by the ultra-Catholic Duke of Guise and the Huguenot Admiral de Coligny—although the presence of the Duke of Montmorency hints the possibility of a via media, as he “seemed to hold a kind of neutral ground between Guise on the one hand, and the Reformed [nobility]”.14 Yonge identifies this political alignment in her History of France (1878) as well as in The Chaplet: in her textbook account, she describes the Guises as “strong Catholics”, Coligny and his brother as “sincere and earnest reformers” and Montmorency as the head of a “third party” of moderate Catholics, opposed to the power of the Guise family.15 In The Chaplet of Pearls, disaster, it initially seems, might be averted: Charles IX seems to be on the point of committing himself “to an honest, high-minded policy, in which he might have been able to purify his national church, and win back those whom her corruptions had driven to seek truth and morality beyond her pale”.16 This policy is also hinted at in Yonge’s History of France, where she describes the attraction of the young king to the “honesty and uprightness” of the Huguenot leaders.17 The desirability of this via media is articulated more substantially in The Chaplet in the figure of Berenger himself, who finds the French Catholic church has become the tool of “a wicked and bloodthirsty court” but “could not love the rigid bareness, and, as he thought, the irreverence of the Calvinist [service]” which “jarred upon one used to a ritual which retained much of the ancient form”.18 For Berenger, who declares himself determined “never to be unfaithful where I owe faith”,19 loyalty to his wife and to the Anglican church are to

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become one: his decision to hold to his childhood marriage to Eustacie, who has been educated as a Catholic in the convent of Bellaise, is clearly an erotic parallel to his commitment to an Anglicanism which is seen to embrace the best of Catholic traditions, as well as Protestant reformism. Berenger’s commitment to a pure faith is represented emblematically in the chaplet of pearls which is a family inheritance: a chaplet is, of course, a form of rosary and a prayer cycle, while the pearl is a symbol of purity and (in the parable in Matthew’s Gospel) is worth any sacrifice. When the Massacre takes place, Berenger and Eustacie are on the point of eloping together to England, where Berenger hopes and believes that his bride will join the Anglican church.20 The Massacre polarises the religious situation in France, destroying the possibility of a reformed French Catholic church within that generation, and separating the Protestant husband and the Catholic wife, who embody that possibility. With Berenger believed dead, Eustacie fears for his fate of his Protestant soul, and in the intolerant Catholic court now dominated by the Guises, it is only the queen, Elizabeth of Austria, who can offer her any comfort. Privately she tells the apparently bereaved bride that things are very different in the more tolerant climate of the Holy Roman Empire.21 Berenger, who has in fact survived the Massacre and been transported back to England, also finds himself surrounded largely by those who articulate rigid confessional loyalties: only Cecily, the former nun, thinks charitably of “the little French papist”’ wife, whom Berengar’s family believe to have betrayed him to his attackers of the day of the Massacre . 22 Throughout the rest of the novel, the separated husband and wife attempt to remain loyal to their marriage—the symbol of the meeting of Protestant and Catholic in a reformed church of the via media. Yonge constantly reminds her readers of both the good and bad potential in both Calvinistic Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Eustacie, believing herself to be a widow, takes refuge in the Convent at Bellaise, trying to avoid the Black Ribaumont relatives who wish to force her into a marriage and engross her estates. The convent is “a very comfortable little nunnery” with an abbess who enjoys hawking and wearing fine clothes and jewellery—a sort of female version of Chaucer’s monk. The convent represents the lax but not immoral character of French monasticism for Yonge. Eustacie is, however, is more attracted to the stricter and reformed conventual tradition represented by Sister Monique, who has decamped to nearby Luçon, where she later becomes the prioress—a reminder to the reader that monasticism per se is not the focus of Yonge’s critique here, but rather the failings of specific monastic houses.23

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Finding that she is pregnant with Berenger’s child and under pressure from the abbess of Bellaise—who is the sister of the chevalier de Ribaumont—to marry her cousin Narcisse, Eustacie escapes the convent and takes refuge with her own peasant tenants. When they can no longer shelter her safely, Eustacie is passed on to a Huguenot farming family, who protect her for the sake of her Protestant husband. They conceal her in the rather creepy old ruin of a Knight Templar house, where she shares her refuge with a persecuted Huguenot minster, Isaac Gardon. After the birth of her child—Berengère—Eustacie travels through northern France with Gardon, posing as his daughter-in-law. Gardon becomes her instructor in the via media of Anglicanism, for—despite being a Huguenot minister—he is no extremist Calvinist. As Yonge tells us: He …was a deeply learned scholar, who had studied all the bearings of the controversy; and, though bound to the French Huguenots by long service and persecution in their cause, he belonged to that class of French Reformers who would gladly have come to terms with the Catholics at the Conference of Plassy, and regretted the more decided Calvinism that his party had since professed, and in which the Day of St Bartholomew confirmed them. He had little desire to win proselytes, but rather laid his hand to build up true religion where he found it suffering shocks, in these unsettled, neglected times; and his present wish was rather to form and guide this little wilful warm-hearted mother … to find a home in the Church that had been her husband’s, than to gain her for his own party.24

Accordingly, when the pair take shelter in the house of Noemi Laurent, in the Huguenot town of La Sablerie, this staid Huguenot widow is surprised to find Eustacie “full of little Catholic observances” and to hear Gardon giving her very little religious instruction and that “mere Christianity instead of controversial Calvinism”. 25 While Mme Laurent is merely puzzled, the Huguenot ladies of Montauban—where Gardon and Eustacie take shelter after the sacking of La Sablerie by the Catholic court party— are scandalised by the gay ribbons worn by Berengère and her mother’s abrupt departure from a service after her child has been chastised by an official.26 In her History of France, too, Yonge points out the failings of the extreme Calvinism of the Huguenots, describing it as “harsh and stern” and leading to the persecution in Huguenot areas of the Catholic clergy.27 In The Chaplet, Yonge clarifies her heroine’s spiritual condition, showing that she “clung to the Huguenots” only because they saved her from “an abhorrent marriage”. Gardon, Yonge argues, was opening up much “that was new and precious to her”, but he was substantially building on “the foundations [which] had been laid by Mère Monique”. Eustacie’s faith thus combines the best of French Catholic and Huguenot traditions,

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although she “would have laid down her life as a Calvinist martyr, in profound ignorance that she was not in the least a Calvinist all the time”.28 While Eustacie is being transformed into a “reformed” Catholic, a suitable partner for her Anglican husband, by a moderate Huguenot minister, Berenger is holding to the English church and its via media in the face of ultra-Roman Catholicism—and receiving help from genuinely pious Catholics. In search of his wife, Berenger returns to France and traces his family to La Sablerie. He and his party are rescued from the sandflats of Olonne, where they are lost in a fog, when the good priest of Nissard, Abbé Columbeau, rings the church bells to help lost travellers. The priest’s name—which includes the French word for dove—is a clear guide to his function: unlike the court Catholics, he is a peaceable and charitable representative of his church. He shelters Berenger’s party, narrates to them with sympathy the events at La Sablerie, and gives Berenger hope that his daughter has survived the massacre and is safely bestowed in a convent (that of Mother Monique, in fact). Berenger, exhibiting the catholicity of his faith, attends the mass as he grieves for his wife, and indeed the priest thinks he is “a promising convert”.29 In his attempts to reclaim his daughter, Berenger is, however, captured as an enemy of the state—Henri III, a king strongly influenced by the Catholic League has now come to the throne—and finds himself the prisoner of his relative, the Chevalier de Ribaumont. The Black Ribaumont family—who are trying to keep the couple separate in the hope of gaining Eustacie’s estates—stand as representatives of worldly and political Roman Catholicism. While Narcisse, the Chevalier’s son, is a cruel and thoroughly committed Catholic of this kind, the Chevalier himself and his daughter Diane—the femme fatale of the novel—are more interesting and ambiguous characters. Diane is one of Catherine de Medici’s squadron, a “bevy of ladies”, as Yonge describes them in her History of France, who “try to detach the Huguenot leaders, by entangling them in the pleasures of the court and lowering their sense of duty”.30 Diane, however, does not succeed in seducing her English Protestant target; in fact, she falls in love with Berenger, conceiving a passion for him which her pursuit of “the feverish form of devotion then in vogue in Paris … penances, processions, and sermons” cannot quell. Living on the “outward husk of the Roman Catholic church, not penetrating its living power”, she desperately wishes to marry Berenger, “longing to rest on the only perfect truth she had ever known in man”. But both her faith and her love are tainted: while she prays with “passionate ardour” to St Eustace—a married saint—to help her to win Berenger, she also employs the court-perfumer, René of Milan, to make her a love-portion.31 Yonge further hints at the shallow nature of

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Diane’s courtly Catholic faith when a fortune-teller visits the castle in which the Black Ribaumonts have imprisoned Berenger: Berenger himself refuses to compromise his beliefs by consulting this “mountebank”. Diane, however, chooses to hear the fortune-teller. 32 Later, paradoxically, she makes his predictions come true by helping Berenger and his party to escape when her brother Narcisse arrives, intending to murder them. She accompanies them disguised as a youth, and—on the discovery of her real identity—is fittingly placed by Berenger under the protection of the virtuous Catholic priest, Columbeau.33 Eventually, she enters the convent at Luçon as a penitent, and becomes a saintly abbess in the tradition of Mother Monique, a “reformed” Catholic redeemed by the example of Berenger’s Anglican “truth and purity”.34 It is not only Diane among the Black Ribaumont family who serves to allow Yonge to articulate and define Berenger’s Anglicanism: so, too, does her brother Narcisse, an enthusiastic supporter of the Guises, Henri III, and the Catholic League who uses religious extremism to further his personal ambition to gain the Ribaumont estates, either by marrying Eustacie or by destroying the White Ribaumonts entirely. This becomes apparent as the novel climaxes with the meeting of Eustacie and Berenger at the beleaguered Huguenot fort of Pont de Dronne, where Berenger finds his wife engaged in burying her foster father Gardon and nursing the wounded, who have named her “Our Lady of Hope”. This Catholicsounding title incorporates the name which she had assumed as Gardon’s Huguenot daughter-in-law—Espérance—and represents how Eustacie has come to embody the via media, and to be “a sort of successor to the patroness of the convent” of Notre-Dame de l’Espérance which once graced the town. Appropriately enough, she nurses the Huguenot wounded in the fort’s disused abbey church, which she has cleaned and partially reconstructed with “a tender, reverential hand”.35 Berenger discovers his family when he rescues his daughter from an attempted assassination by Narcisse, and recognises that the necklace she wears are the pearls of Ribaumont; fittingly, he gives thanks for his reunion with his wife and child in the refurbished abbey church, an emblem of the “reformed” Catholicism which he and his wife now both represent.36 The superiority of this Anglo-Catholicism to the corrupt Catholicism of the French court is demonstrated by Berenger’s compassion to his dying enemy, Narcisse. Despite Narcisse’s taunts that “one of your sort would sooner hang me” than bring a priest to administer last rites, Berenger not only fetches Columbeau, but also protects the hut in which his relative lies “lest any of the more fanatical of the Huguenots should deem it their duty to break in on what they had worked themselves into believing offensive idolatry”.37

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The construction of the Anglican via media through the lives and adventures of the two central characters is reinforced in Yonge’s narrative by the career of a mutual acquaintance. Mericour first enters the novel as a young abbé who has been brought to court “to solicit a benefice and who knew nobody”, and who befriends and counsels moderation to Berenger when he first finds out about the schemes of his Black Ribaumont relatives. 38 He next appears on the night of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, “pale, breathless, horror-struck”, when he protects Eustacie and is anxious to inform the king about this “‘night of horrors’”. 39 At La Sablerie, now himself a fugitive, he meets Eustacie again; he explains to her and the sympathetic Gardon how his arrival at court, after a provincial education with “a pious and excellent tutor”, had made him aware of the corruption of the French Catholic church, which contrasted with the “pure lives of the Huguenots”. Horrified by the Massacre—and still more by the papal endorsement of it—he had begun to inquire into the roots of his faith, and this had excited “suspicions of Huguenot inclinations” in his ultraCatholic brother, who insisted on his participating in breaking up a Huguenot assembly. Instead, he had warned the assembly and fled. But extreme Protestants had proved as unhelpful to him as extreme Catholics: taking refuge with some Huguenot relatives, he found that they would not allow him time to examine and consider what they taught him. As Yonge puts it, All the poor lad wanted was time to think, time to examine, time to consult authorities, living and dead. The Catholics called this treason to the church, the Huguenots called it halting between two opinions; and between them, he was a proscribed, distrusted vagabond ….40

This he finds in England, where Eustacie sends him with a message to her husband’s family. At Hurst Walwyn, he finds “himself in his natural element”: discussing theology with Berenger’s tutor, Adderley, and attending the Anglican service in the family chapel “both satisfied him far better than what he had seen among the French Calvinists”’.41 Here he falls in love with Lucy Thistlewood, the step-daughter of Berenger’s mother by her second marriage, and—since his priestly vows were never complete—proposes to train as a lawyer and marry his English bride. He ends the novel as an English Anglican, “a staid, self-reliant, scholarly person”, the heir of his Huguenot relatives and the possessor of an “English passport”.42

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Stray Pearls. The Memoirs of Margaret de Ribaumont, Viscountess of Bellaise (1883) Stray Pearls, the second of the Anglo-French novels, opens in the 1630s and deals with Berenger’s and Eustacie’s grandchildren, Margaret, Eustace, and Annora. In this novel, France and its religious and political developments are presented less as a contrast to England and more as a parallel: the Anglican via media is defined, not so much in contrast with the extremes of French religion, courtly Catholicism and Calvinistic Protestantism, as in line with the “reformed” Catholicism offered in sections of the French Catholic church of the seventeenth century. In particular, Yonge paints a sympathetic portrait of St Vincent de Paul, the founder of several active religious orders for both men and women, and a clear reforming influence on the devotional lives of both clergy and laity. In her History of France, she had also offered this more positive portrait of French Catholicism, describing St Vincent as one of “the best men of any time”, whose work meant that the French church was “in a far better state than before”;43 additionally, she had recounted the heroic early life of the saint in the story of “The Voluntary Convict” in A Book of Golden Deeds (1864).44 In Stray Pearls, therefore, Yonge used the saint and the reformed Catholic tradition which he represented to define a meeting ground for English Anglicans and genuinely devout French Catholics through the lives of her three central characters. (Similarly, politically, the Civil War in England and the Fronde in France are seen as not dissimilar events. This sense of parallel political developments was made still more explicit in Yonge’s earlier publication, A Parallel History of France and England, where she explicitly compared the two nations’ civil conflicts: “both in France and England, the nobility having lost much of their power, the crown had come into collision with the middle classes”. However, she pointed out the contrasts too, arguing that the English parliament had “more vigour and substance” than the French, and that the Fronde was not—like the English Civil War—a dispute about religion as well as politics).45 The most prominent of the three characters—and the main narrator—is Margaret de Ribaumont, and interestingly, she is the only one of the three to be brought up as a Roman Catholic, at the request of her French Catholic mother. The common ground between the Roman Catholic church and Anglicanism is early established in the novel when Margaret tells us that Eustacie—the heroine of the preceding novel—made “no difference” in her religious training of the two elder children: “Our grandmother taught us [i.e. Margaret and Eustace] both alike to make the

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cross, and likewise to say our prayers and the catechism”. Only when Margaret grows up does she discover the differences between Catholic and Protestant, when her mother takes her to the queen’s chapel at Whitehall, while her siblings attend the two-hour sermons of a Protestant minister. Margaret quickly moves on to tell us, however, about the fruits of her mature reflection on the apparent schism between the English and the Roman Catholic churches: Since that time I have through much more, and talked over the subject both with my dear eldest brother and with good priests, both English and French, and I have come to the conclusion...that the English doctrine [i.e. Anglicanism] is no heresy, and that the Church is a true Church and Catholic, though, as my home and my duties lie here [i.e. in France], I remain where I was brought up by my mother, in the communion of my husband and children.46

Margaret’s arranged marriage to Phillippe, Viscount of Bellaise, and her subsequent removal to France allows Yonge to present—through her eyes—a largely positive picture of the renascent French Catholic church of the mid-seventeenth century. She begins by representing to us a Catholic couple who practice a devoted domesticity, inspired and supported by the resurgent spiritual authority of the French Catholic church: on the night that Margaret’s decision to accompany her husband on his military campaigns is endorsed by the social and cultural leader of Parisian society, Madame de Rambouillet, the young couple hear and are deeply moved by a sermon from an extemporary sermon from the young cleric, JacqueBenigné Bossuet. Margaret tells her readers that: I can never convey to you how this world and all its fleeting follies seemed to melt away before us, and how each of us felt our soul alone in the presence of our Maker, as though nothing mattered or ever would matter, but how we stood with Him…that night we [i.e. Margaret and Philippe] dedicated ourselves to the God who had not let us be put asunder.47

The key role of Bossuet is interesting. Yonge does not draw attention to his later leading role in Gallicanism, a movement within the French church which favoured the imposition of limitations on papal power, preferring to stress his role as an influential preacher interested in stimulating the devotional lives of Catholics such as her fictional characters.48 But she later makes it clear that Gallicans such as Bossuet were often the most likely of French Catholics to be sympathetic to the position of Laudian High Churchmen in England, as they shared a belief in the largely autonomous role of national churches which could favour a

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recognition of the Anglican communion as a genuine branch of the universal Catholic church. Yonge further develops her portrait of Margaret as a virtuous Catholic French laywoman, after describing Philippe’s untimely death from wounds received in the Thirty Years War, after a confession full of “holy love, trust, and penitence”.49 Margaret now returns to the family estates with their only child, Gaspard, and once again a figure of genuine spiritual authority within the French Catholic church offers religious advice and consolation: while en route, Margaret hears Vincent de Paul delivering a sermon which “gave the strongest sense of healing balm to my sore heart”, and she seeks an interview with him which inspires her to fulfil her duties to her father-in-law and her child.50 As Geoffrey Rowell has pointed out, St Vincent had already become an inspiration both for Anglo-Catholic sisterhoods and the work of dedicated Ritualist priests in the London slums.51 So it is not surprising that Yonge presents him very positively. Another French clergyman, this time fictional, is also treated sympathetically. A key figure in the household Margaret establishes is the virtuous and scholarly priest Bonchamp, who was her husband’s tutor and now becomes her son’s and her own, enabling her to read Cicero and the works of Pope Gregory the Great.52 Nevertheless, despite this generally positive portrait of French Catholicism, Yonge hints at limitations to reform, both religious and political, in seventeenth-century France. Bonchamp believes that Margaret’s determination to lighten the burden of segneurial dues is a “noble inspiration”, but does not believe that she can “change the customs of centuries” and thinks that “innovations are dangerous”. Similarly, although Margaret wins the support of the “young and spirited” Abbess of Bellaise, this cloistered nun cannot help to effect reforms. In addition, Cécile— Margaret’s young sister-in-law and the wife of Armand d’Aubepine, a neglectful husband more typical of his class than Philippe de Ribaumont, in Yonge’s opinion— has been brought up in a convent of “very ignorant” nuns, who have “taught her nothing but her prayers, a little reading, some writing, very bad orthography, embroidery, and heraldry”.53 The restriction on Margaret’s activities as lady bountiful and the poverty of Cécile’s education suggests that Yonge would probably argue that a better state of affairs had prevailed in England before the Civil War: indeed, she shows Margaret’s brother Eustace approving her paternalistic activities, looking at the matter with “the eyes of an English lord of the manor”.54 Margaret’s meeting with her exiled mother, brother, and sister in Paris allow Yonge to continue to demonstrate both the seventeenth-century renaissance of French Catholicism, and the corruption which continues to .

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bedevil it. Back in the capital city, Margaret once again encounters Father Vincent de Paul, and becomes “a member of the society for attending the poor at the Hôtel Dieu”,55 becoming for her authoress the model of the pious French Catholic laywoman. Indeed, she is clearly modelled on one such real life individual. After she is rescued from an attempted abduction by a persistent suitor by the future Cardinal de Retz, then co-adjutor of Paris, she recalls that “that devout widow, Madame de Miramion, had endured such an abduction as mine at the hands of Bussy Rabutin, and had been rescued by her mother-in-law”. 56 This widow’s early life is remarkably similar to Margaret’s: married to a like-minded husband, she lost him early in the marriage and she was the mother of only one child. Madame de Miramion, an associate of Vincent de Paul, was later involved in a range of charitable activities and was the co-founder and first superior of the Daughters of Charity, an order which nursed the sick. However, while Yonge presents Margaret as the model of a Catholic laywoman, she continues to suggest the limitations inherent in “reformed” French Catholicism. For instance, it is seen to make some of its devotees compassionate to the individual poor, but unwilling to support root and branch reform of oppressive royal and feudal practices: while Queen Anne of Austria in her private capacity herself works at the Hôtel Dieu, “most tenderly” caring for the sick, in her public role as regent, Margaret points out, she commits to policies which ensure “that the poor might be more and more ground down!”.57 While Margaret herself and Clement Darpent’s mother are presented admiringly as models of Catholic lay-womanhood, Margaret’s imprisonment after her abduction in a priory “which had contained no monks ever since the time of the Huguenots”, serving solely to give “title and revenue to the Abbé St Leu”, “one of the dissipated young clergy about court” is a clear reminder of the corruption still inherent in the seventeenth-century French church. 58 That political or courtly Catholicism is still alive and well is aptly demonstrated in the novel, not only by the off-stage figure of the power behind the throne, Cardinal Mazarin, but the minor character of Jean François Paul de Gondi, the co-adjutor of Paris, an adroit and somewhat unprincipled popular politician and a rival at court to the power of Mazarin. Annora, Margaret’s sister, points out that the noble Frondeurs—aristocratic rebels against the king—lack the real principles of the English parliamentarians, as they only “wanted to spite the Cardinal” rather than introduce constitutional reforms: “Even the Co-adjutor, who was the prime mover of all, only wanted to be the chief of a party”. Although the co-adjutor is later to rescue Margaret from her abductors, Annora is clear that his major motivation is “an

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especial delight in exposing a scandal” and a chance to outmanoeuvre his political opponents .59 In Margaret’s brother, Eustace, Lord Walwyn, Yonge creates a character comparable to Berenger in The Chaplet of Pearls: an Englishman who embodies the Anglican via media and by remaining committed to his faith in Catholic France, attracts others to it. The divisions of the Civil War have cost him his fiancée Millicent Wardour: while he has remained loyal to the king, her parents have favoured the parliamentarian side. Accordingly, both she and the pearls of Ribaumont have become the possessions of a Protestant Dutchman, Van Hunker. Escorted to London by his cousin, the parliamentarian Henry Merrycourt (the descendant of Mericour), for his trial, Eustace avoids the puritan Sunday service on offer as he stays in a Roundhead household. Margaret reminds her readers— allegedly her own Catholic grand-children—that: …though you suppose all Protestants to be alike, such members of the English Church as my family, stand as far apart from the sects that distracted England as we do from the Huguenots; and it was almost as much against my brother’s conscience to join their worship, as it would be against our own. The English Church claims to be a branch of the true Catholic Church, and there are those among the Gallicans who are ready to admit her claims.60

Instead, Eustace uses the time of the service to pray privately with his Prayer-Book, which, Margaret tells her readers, “he loved it as much as we love our Book of Hours, and indeed, it is much the very same, for which reason it was then forbidden in England”. Having established the links between the “reformed” French Catholicism which Margaret professes and her brother’s High Church Anglicanism, Yonge then proceeds to demonstrate the integrity of this Anglo-Catholic position by describing how Eustace refuses Millicent’s offer to set him free in the absence of his Puritan hosts, and indeed, encourages her to join in the Litany with him, comforting her for her unhappy marriage to Van Hunker.61 While Eustace in England had demonstrated the distinction between Anglicanism and the Calvinistic Protestantism of the Puritans, in exile in France he resists the counter-pressure of Roman Catholicism. He is under pressure to convert from both his Catholic mother and a Catholic convert, the priest Walter Montagu. Montagu tries to persuade him that “the English church was extinct, stifled by her own heretic children”, an argument which Eustace counters with his insistence that “his Church was in the course of being purified”. Later in the book, when Eustace is extremely ill, this pressure increases greatly, and—although it does not

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weaken his attachment to Anglicanism—he is only saved from undue agitation by the intervention of the Duke of Gloucester, the only one of Charles I’s sons to die a Protestant.62 Just as Eustace serves a similar function to Berenger in The Chaplet of Pearls, so Stray Pearls has another character similar to Mericour: a Frenchman who eventually becomes an Anglican, married to an English wife, and living in England. Eustace’s Anglican influence serves to convert Clement Darpent, a young French lawyer recruited to help to regain the Ribaumont family estates. Darpent’s religious background is a “reformed” Catholic one, although from a different tradition to that which influences Margaret’s faith: it clearly predisposes him to Anglicanism. Our narrator tells us that his family were Huguenots, but had converted to the Roman Catholic church some twenty years previously. However, the family are strongly influenced by Jansenism, an austere reforming movement which highlighted the Augustinian emphasis on the sinfulness of man and the necessity of divine grace to such an extent that its followers were accused of holding the same predestinarian beliefs as Calvinists. Whatever the theological controversies it provoked, it was deeply attractive to many French Catholics seeking a more devotional spiritual life: as Gerald R. Cragg has pointed out, “If Gallicanism sought to safeguard the autonomy of the church of France, Jansenism sought to achieve its purification”.63 In Yonge’s Jansenist family we find Darpent’s mother, a pious and saintly woman: two of her daughters are in the reforming Port Royal convent associated with the movement, and “she was with them in heart, the element of Augustinianism having found a responsive chord in her soul from her Calvinist education”. She passes her time “in prayers, pious exercises, and works of charity” and hopes that her son will become one of the recluses who live near Port Royal (who, of course, included the mathematician Pascal). Mme Darpent has achieved a spiritual resting place between her original Huguenot beliefs and her new Catholic adherence, strongly influenced by the Jansenism of the PortRoyal community, which—after her son’s marriage—she joins. 64 Eustace’s sister, Annora, expresses a sense of how she embodies the best of both Protestant and Catholic positions when she describes Mme Darpent as “so like a Puritan dame” but also “like some grand old saint in a picture”.65 In her History of France, Yonge also described the Jansenists very positively, pointing out how the “reform of discipline at Port Royal” attracted “some of the most excellent and able people in France”.66 Darpent himself, unlike his mother, is spiritually “restless and dissatisfied”, caught between two stools: “by no means disposed to return to Calvinism, and yet with too much of the old leaven in him to remain

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contented in the [Catholic] Church”.67 This state of mind is paralleled by his political opinions: a participant in the original Fronde of the Parlement, he increasingly becomes disillusioned with political activism, as he finds himself caught between the aristocratic Frondistes led by the Prince of Conde and the increasingly absolutist court of the young Louis XIV.68 As he attempts to negotiate a middle ground as a representative of the Parlement, he becomes so unpopular with both parties that he is forced to flee from France, taking refuge in Holland. Here Darpent is received into the English Church: “Clement had long inclined that way…”. 69 His passage from Huguenot to Jansenist Catholic to Anglican is subtly charted through the course of the novel: we are told that he “retained something of the Huguenot gravity”, when he appears at a salon, and he is the writer of a poem on St Monica, the mother of Augustine, the patristic author to whom he turns for consolation after the shipwreck of his political ideals and ambitions. 70 Augustine, as Yonge was clearly aware, was a key influence on Jansenist theology, in particular in the form of the doctrine of original sin. Fittingly, at the close of the novel, the newly Anglican Clement marries Annora, Eustace’s younger sister. Appropriately, he is found work in England with the Commonwealth government, in translating negotiations for peace with France, by Harry Merrycourt, the descendant of Claud Mericour. 71 A significant historical continuity between the French converts to the Anglican church is thus established.

The Release, or Caroline’s French Kindred (1896) The Release, Yonge’s last historical novel, provides an interesting coda to the earlier Anglo-French novels. It is not a well-structured novel exhibiting the thematic gravitas and coherence of The Chaplet of Pearls, as Yonge herself acknowledged in the preface.72 Instead, it brings together the somewhat disparate tales of Caroline Darpent, her two Bellaise cousins, Melanie and Cécile, and two Catholic nuns of aristocratic birth, one of whom is eventually dispensed from her vows to marry her middle-class lover. More generally, it illustrates the impact of the French Revolution on a convent, several Catholic clergy, and a network of aristocratic families, and the help afforded to French émigrés by the English gentry. Indeed, on a modest scale, Caroline becomes—with the assistance of her family—a sort of female precursor of the Scarlet Pimpernel. However, despite the fact that the novel was essentially an adventure story-cum-romance, it does demonstrate how the now aged Anglo-Catholic novelist was repositioning herself theologically towards the close of her long life. By the 1890s, she was clearly aware of the increasing impact of secularisation and

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of rational and scientific scepticism. Accordingly The Release—rather than dramatising the search for an Anglican compromise between extremes of Catholicism and Protestantism—seems to be negotiating an ecumenical truce between the Anglican and Catholic communions in the face of a much greater enemy: secularism. Yonge’s lifelong Tory politics clearly reinforced her sense of the need for an accommodation between AngloCatholics and Roman Catholics in the face of liberal and radical irreligion, embodied in the novel by the French Revolution. Caroline Darpent is, in fact, the perfect figure to facilitate such an accommodation. The orphan daughter of a French Catholic mother and an English Anglican father, when she is brought to her uncle’s home, Walwyn Court, she is found to know the catechism, but also to have inherited “a crucifix and a string of beads” from her mother.73 When her French aunt, the Marquise de Bellaise, offers to educate her with her own two daughters in a French convent and subsequently arrange a good marriage for her, her Anglican uncle decides that it is best that she accepts this invitation. As Yonge describes it, although uncertain whether her parents would have educated her as a Catholic, he thinks that “if she was to be bred up and married in France, she had better conform to the faith of the country”.74 Yonge explains Mr Darpent’s relatively open attitude to French Catholicism as the product of the increasingly civilised and tolerant climate of later eighteenth-century Britain: As to her uncle, it is a curious fact that the mutual antipathy between Roman Catholics and Protestants was a good deal in abeyance in the latter years of the eighteenth century. It seems to have died down in the general indifference. Roman Catholic priests, educated in foreign universities, were cultivated gentlemen, friends of the more educated gentry. Dr Milner and Dr Lingard are examples. Hannah More was the intimate friend of Mrs Garrick, and Mrs Jean Moore, the sister of the hero of Corunna, was educated in a French convent before the Revolution.75

Yonge’s interpretation of the later eighteenth century may well reflect her uneasy sense of a “general indifference” to religion in the close of her own century. Indeed, although Mr Darpent allows Caroline to be educated at the convent of St. Lucie, he is not “quite happy” about it—not so much because it is a Catholic institution, but that it is not the best example of such an establishment. Yonge reminds her readers that seventeenthcentury convents had, “in the days of Madame de Chantal and Madame de Maintenon, been made in many instances admirable places of education”, but regrets that the convent of St. Lucie, although “once inclined to Jansenism” had declined since then. The bishop had “sealed up all the

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translations of the works of St Augustine, and decidedly discouraged study of any kind”, leaving only the lives of the saints for the convent pupils to read, while only a few of the nuns sought to read more extensively.76 The implication here is that it is not Catholicism per se, but worldly and lax Catholicism which concerns Mr Darpent and his creator (just as it is not paternal feudalism per se, but the oppressive and inhumane feudalism of the ancien régime which attracted Yonge’s criticism). This is made particularly clear in what is perhaps the crux of the novel: the profession of two young aristocratic women as nuns. Caroline, who— on her return to England and her marriage to an English naval captain has “accepted English habits and English church-going quite naturally”, showing her French education only in her “dainty convent cooking and exquisite needlework” 77 —is again in France to witness this particular event. One of the two prospective nuns is Félicité de Monfichet, who is in love with the bourgeois scientist, Henri Beaudesert. Félicité’s opposition to an arranged marriage to another aristocrat has led her uncle, the bishop of Charmilly, to rebuke her both for disobedience to her parents and “love for an impious philosopher”. However, as Yonge hastens to assure us, Beaudesert is no religious sceptic: his father was a “sincerely religious” doctor of medicine, and his “really devout” wife had “a tinge of Jansenism, and had brought up her children so as to be free from either scepticism or immorality”.78 Once again, as in Stray Pearls, Yonge aligns the French bourgeoisie or gens de robes with Huguenot or Catholic Jansenist positions: they clearly offer a constructive and moderate critique of the complacent Catholicism of the aristocracy and the church hierarchy, as well of as the corrupt, exploitative, and oppressive politics of the ancien régime. However, while Félicité’s profession is a forced one, Yonge does not wish to imply a wholesale critique of monasticism. As a counterfoil to Félicité’s story, she offers us that of Madeleine de Torcy, “who is quite as eager to take the vows as Félicité is to avoid them”.79 Yonge is careful to contrast the two young women as “votaress and victim” during the ceremony: while Madeleine’s voice is “clear and distinct” and her face shows “deep solemnity and joyfulness”, Félicité’s voice “trembled” and her face is “as white as the veil”. Félicité collapses during the ceremony, while Madeleine looks like the “pictured face of St Catherine”: “Now all was fulfilled! The desire of her heart from her cradle had been the dedication of herself, which was now accomplished”.80 Immediately after this glowing endorsement of monastic celibacy for those who are called to it, follows a critique of its imposition on those who are not. Caroline comments to her cousin Cécile: ‘I have seen how what is most holy can be most perverted’.

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Chapter Eight ‘Chut!’, exclaimed Cécile, ‘we must not have your Protestant talk in these walls. You surely know better who grew up here’. ‘What I know is what made our ancestors Protestants’, responded Caroline. ‘Yet what could be more holy and devout than our sweet Madeleine?’ ‘All the worst that the semblance of such devotion should be used as the means of coercion!’81

The contrast between the votaress and the victim continues throughout the novel. When Caroline moves into the convent as a boarder to avoid the increasing violence in Paris, she finds Félicité tearful and “drooping”, while Madeleine is “as happy as the day is long”, wearing as she says her beads “a rapt look of meditation, as though the rosary was not to her a mechanical arrangement for soulless forms, but a real implement for aiding devout aspiration”. Caroline’s education has been “so far Catholic” that she is able to support and counsel the unhappy Félicité appropriately.82 It is so far Protestant, however, that she encourages her to pray for emancipation from her forced vows. Whatever Yonge’s earlier reservations about the laxity and worldiness of the convent, she empathises entirely with the experiences of the community as the Revolution advances. Their resources dwindle and most of the nuns are sent home to their families: Yonge even-handedly comments that some “wept bitterly” while others “could not help betraying pleasure in the change of scene and the prospect of living with their families”.83 Yonge’s treatment of Catholicism is increasingly positive and this is particularly reflected in the story of Madeleine de Torcy. Madeleine is undaunted by the increasing privations, declaring “‘It is like the Church of the Catacombs’” and thus establishing her martyr’s credentials.84 Indeed, the events of the Revolution are used to show the depth of her genuine commitment and devotion: when the surviving sisters are rescued by the Irish ferryman, Dennis Molony—at the instigation of Caroline— Madeleine stays behind with the prioress and a dying nun, “‘a martyr, a willing martyr’”.85 The prioress, who escapes the cull of aristocrats during the Terror, later tells her story to Caroline: when she and Madeleine were captured, the young nun treated her captors with kindness and tended the sick prisoners in the prison of La Force. The prioress comments that she “’loved to tell them of St Perpetua and the other blessed saints in whose steps she said it was granted to us to tread’”. In the end, the young saint “‘in the true spirit of martyrdom’”, gave her own life to save that of the prioress.86 Her celebration here of aristocratic and clerical heroism in the face of death during the Terror is very similar to the account of “The Second of September, 1792” which she had earlier given in A Book of

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Golden Deeds (1864); this chapter was succeeded by an equally sympathetic coverage of the revolt of the conservative and devout Vendée region against the French Revolutionary government. 87 It is to this rebellion Yonge now turns in The Release. Indeed, her increasingly sympathetic figuring of the Catholic church in the context of the Revolution was reflected not only in the representation of Madeleine but also of Abbé Caseforte. Rescued by Caroline’s husband, Captain Aylmer, in the Bay of Biscay, he has escaped during execution by drowning, imposed by the Revolutionary commissioner Carrier on clergy loyal to the crown and pope. Through Caseforte’s narrative of his adventures, Yonge is able to paint another positive picture of the conservative reaction in the Vendée region: he describes how he has witnessed “’heroic courage and piety worthy of the first ages of the Church’” in the Vendée aristocratic leaders—Lescure, Rochejacquelin, Bonchamp, and Cathelineau—and pitiless and inhumane cruelty, inflicted even on women and children, by the Revolutionary forces. 88 It is particularly important to note the allusions to the early church in Rome which appear in both Madeleine’s life-story and Casaforte’s account of the Vendée rising: they suggest that Yonge feels that the French Roman Catholic church was being purified of its lax and worldly character by the events of the French Revolution, thus becoming more spiritually aligned with the Anglican church at the very moment when the assistance of the English sister church was most needed. This movement towards conjunction is stressed by Yonge’s description of the audience’s response to Casaforte’s tragic narrative: Casaforte’s history was listened to with tears of burning indignation and sympathy, such as could only find utterance in such word’s as Milton’s — Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountain cold.89

This is a frankly startling and obviously very deliberate choice of quotation by Yonge: it is the opening two lines of a poem by the Puritan John Milton (“On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, 1655”) denouncing the Catholic Duke of Savoy’s massacre in 1655 of the Piedmontese Calvinistic Protestants known as the Vaudois or Waldensians. It seems likely that Yonge chose this particular quotation in order to present the Revolutionary massacre of Catholic clergy as a form of retribution for the Church’s own earlier cruelties, and as a purging and purifying experience of martrydom. But she may also have intended to suggest to her Protestant readers that the new wars of religion were not now between extreme

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Catholics and extreme Protestants, but between Christians and sceptics— in the face of which, an emphasis on ecumenical unity and the establishment of the neutral ground of Anglo-Catholicism was appropriate. She may also have expected her readers to link the seventeenth-century Commonwealth’s vigorous response to the Piedmont massacre to the generous British reception of Catholic émigrés in the 1790s: England is in both cases seen as the supporter of those persecuted for their religion. Even before Yonge recounts Casaforte’s tragic story, she has already suggested the growing mutual tolerance and sympathy between the Roman Catholic and the Anglican churches produced by the events of the Revolution. Her description of the reception of the sisters of the St. Lucie community in the Alymer household—the family into which Caroline herself had married— does not conceal the continuing tensions between the two denominations, but also emphasises the increasing mutual understanding. “Pity for French émigrés was strong in the nation at the time”, Yonge comments, and the Caroline’s mother-in-law provides the sisters with accommodation until a local Catholic family is found to offer them a more permanent refuge.90 Caroline’s hospitality is acknowledged fully by one of the sisters, who comments that “no Catholic could be more good and kind to us”, despite her promotion of what the nuns see as an undesirable interview between Henri de Beaudesert and Félicité.91 The establishment of a temporary chapel in one of the dressing-rooms does present the elder Mrs Alymer with a dilemma, … for to her old-fashioned Calvinist training it seemed like encouraging idol worship, and she consulted the rector whether she ought to suffer it. Happily he was a man with more instruction and some largeness of mind, and though he could not make her understand the distinctions of worship, she accepted his dictum that it would be cruel to interfere with the religious habits of her unfortunate inmates, and that she might be satisfied that they believed the same creed and worshipped God like herself.92

The same respect for Catholic beliefs and practice is evident in Yonge’s conclusion to the story of the reluctant nun, Félicité. In the hands of a radical Protestant writer, this would have been transformed into the tale of a second Maria Monk: a nun rescued from a convent where she was being held against her will in an oppressive institution rife with petty cruelties, unnatural austerities, sexual perversion, and superstitious practices. In Yonge’s version, however, Félicité refuses to liberate herself by simply abandoning her vows and marrying Henri de Beaudesert. When her lover offers to take her to a Catholic chapel in England and marry her without informing the priest of “the cruel imposed title”, Félicité refuses to do so;

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she also rejects his suggestion of a Protestant marriage, claiming that “‘That would not be the benediction of our only true Mother’’’.93 Caroline supports her in her determination to achieve an official release from her vows by taking her case to the pope. Indeed, even Caroline’s husband, a naval captain who is highly suspicious of Catholicism and not the most theologically sophisticated commentator, recognises that this is the right course of action: ‘Pity she could not see her way to marry the poor young fellow out of hand and have done with it; but as those Romans call the old Pope the captain of the ship, and she has sworn to the articles, she is a good girl to stand by them, and you were quite right to help her’.94

This ringing endorsement of the Roman Catholic church’s authority chimes in well with the Anglo-Catholic emphasis on the importance of obedience to the clerical hierarchy, with a strong emphasis on sacramental role of the priesthood, and sense of an apostolic succession. However, Yonge keeps in balance her sense of the need for AngloCatholics to show respect for the Roman Catholic church and her perception of its need to reform. When Félicité travels to Rome to seek emancipation from her vows, she is accompanied by her prioress—her religious superior—who wishes to support her case. But the prioress’s consent to her release has come as a direct result of her experience of the French Revolution. In conversation with Caroline, the prioress reveals that …the sin which had pressed most severely on her conscience had been her connivance at the compulsion which had brought about the young girl’s reluctant profession ... the convent was poor enough to make the portion a matter of importance, and the Bishop of Charmilly impressed on her that it was a duty to overcome the sinful scruples of the recreant maiden… Such fallacies had fallen away from her as she crouched in a corner of the Luxembourg in momentary expectation of the pike. It was brought home to her the more what was a true vocation, as the devoted virgin, as she watched Soeur Françoise [Madeleine de Torcy].95

Nevertheless—despite Yonge’s support for an ecumenical accommodation between Roman Catholics and Anglicans, and her creation of an historical precedent for it in the events and consequences of the French Revolution —she was very aware of the continuing tensions the continuing tensions between Anglican Protestants and Continental Roman Catholicism, and does not seek to disguise them from her readers. Caroline’s aunt, Mrs Darpent—admittedly a comic character to a large extent—is used to articulate traditional Protestant antipathies and fears about both the French

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and Catholicism. When the elder and younger Mrs Aylmer give refuge to the émigré nuns in their houses, Mrs Darpent arrives to “put a stop to these Popish ways”. Disappointed in her desire to visit the nuns in their private quarters and to inspect their chapel, she is pleasantly horrified to find out from the elder Mrs Aylmer that the nuns do fast ‘“for the sake of their poor country and their sisters, and above all their poor king and queen’”. This she describes as ‘“Popish foolery’”, an attitude which Yonge promptly critiques from an Anglo-Catholic perspective by giving her readers access to Mrs Aylmer’s private thoughts: Mrs Aylmer thought it best not to answer, though she was actually so much of a true Catholic, that she bethought her of the many times in the Scripture that fasting had given wings to prayer ….96

While Mrs Darpent’s embodiment of prejudiced Protestantism makes her a bit of a joke, Yonge does allow rather more admirable characters to experience and express concerns about the Roman Catholic church— among them Captain Aylmer, for example.97 And while the loyal Roman Catholics of the French church—purified as they are by the French Revolution—are seen as natural recipients of Anglican sympathy, friendship and co-operation, Spanish Roman Catholicism is presented as the intolerant, uncivilised, and extreme religion of Protestant polemic tradition. 98 Yonge makes sure that her readers do not forget that unreformed Roman Catholicism continues to present a problem for Anglicans, just as much as ignorant and prejudiced practitioners of Calvinistic Protestantism.99

Conclusion Yonge’s articulation of an Anglo-Catholic position and history through her Anglo-French novels can thus be seen to both a sustained and sophisticated one. In The Chaplet of Pearls, she uses the extremes of French Huguenot Puritanism and courtly Catholicism to suggest the superiority of the English via media achieved through a judiciously AngloCatholic reading of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1558 which parallels the Tractarian interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles in Tracts for the Times. In Stray Pearls, however, she finds more similarities than differences between Laudian High Church Anglicanism and reformed sections of the French Catholic Church, influenced by either movements such as Gallicanism and Jansenism or inspiring individuals such as Saint Vincent de Paul: her positive portrait can be seen to validate the contemporary foundation of Anglican communities and the missionary

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work of slum priests. The Release, meanwhile, suggests that the now ageing Anglo-Catholic was becoming increasingly aware of the impact of secularism and religious scepticism, and supportive of ecumenical activities between the Catholic and Anglican communions. As Alice Fairfax Lucy pointed out in the 1960s, Yonge’s historical fiction often comes near to “Scott’s generous catholicity and dislike of fanaticism”.100 But that does not mean that she was not, in her own way, a theological writer, as these Anglo-French novels amply show.

Bibliography Budge, Gavin. Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel. Oxford, Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 2007. Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “Emily Sarah Holt and the Evangelical Historical Novel: Undoing Sir Walter Scott”, in Clio’s Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790-1899. Edited by Lynn Felber. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Coleridge, Christabel. Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters. London: Macmillan and Co., 1903. Cragg, Gerald R. The Church and the Age of Reason 1648-1789. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970. Dennis, Barbara. Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901): Novelist of the Oxford Movement. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Johnson, Maria Poggi. “The King, the Priest and the Armorer: A Victorian Historical Fantasy of the Via Media”. Clio, 28, no. 4 (Summer, 1999): 399-413. —. “The Case for Anglicanism in Charlotte Yonge’s Historical Fiction”. In Characters and Scenes: Studies in Charlotte M. Yonge, edited by J. Courtney and C. Schultze, 143-158. Abingdon: Beechcroft Books, 2007. Lucy, Alice Fairfax. “The Other Miss Yonge”, in A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge, edited by Georgina Battiscombe and Marghanita Laski, 90-97. London: Cresset Press, 1965. Mitchell, Rosemary A. Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830-1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. —. “Healing the Wounds of War: (A)mending the National Narrative in the Historical Publications of Charlotte M. Yonge”. Women’s History Review 20, no. 2 (November 2011): 785-808. Perkin, John Russell Perkin. Theology and the Victorian Novel. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.

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Walton, Susan. “Charlotte Yonge and the ‘Historic Harem’ of Edward Augustus Freeman”. Journal of Victorian Culture, 11, no. 2 (2006): 226-255. —. Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Period: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2010. Yonge, Charlotte Mary. A Book of Golden Deeds. 1864. Repr., London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1879. —. The Chaplet of Pearls. 1868. Repr., London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1914. —. History of France (History Primers: France) 1878. This ed., repr. of 1882 New York: D. Appleton and Co., Dodo Press, n.d.. —. A Parallel History of France and England. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1871. —. The Release, or Caroline’s French Kindred. 1896. Repr., London: Macmillan and Co, 1899. —. Stray Pearls; the Memoirs of Margaret de Ribaumont, Viscountess of Bellaise. 1883. Repr., London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1894. Rowell, Geoffrey. The Vision Glorious: Themes and Personalities of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Notes 1

Alice Fairfax Lucy, “The Other Miss Yonge”, in A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge, ed. Georgina Battiscombe and Marghanita Laski (London: Cresset Press, 1965), 97. 2 Susan Walton, “Charlotte Yonge and the ‘Historic Harem’ of Edward Augustus Freeman”, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11, no,. 2 (2006): 229. 3 This includes my own work in Rosemary A. Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830-1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 248-59, and “Healing the Wounds of War: (A)mending the National Narrative in the Historical Publications of Charlotte M. Yonge”, Women’s History Review 20, no. 2 (November 2011): 785-808. See also Susan Walton, “Yonge”, 226-255, and her Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Period: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2010), 181-200. 4 Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “Emily Sarah Holt and the Evangelical Historical Novel: Undoing Sir Walter Scott”, in Clio’s Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790-1899, ed. Lynn Felber (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 155. 5 Barbara Dennis, Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901): Novelist of the Oxford Movement (Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). See also, more recently, Gavin Budge, Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in

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the Victorian Novel (Oxford, Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 2007), and John Russell Perkin, Theology and the Victorian Novel (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 75-102. Like Dennis, neither consider Yonge’s historical novels for their theological perspective. 6 Walton, “Yonge”, 234. 7 Maria Poggi Johnson, “The King, the Priest and the Armorer: A Victorian Historical Fantasy of the Via Media”, Clio, 28, no. 4 (Summer, 1999): 399-400. 8 Maria Poggi Johnson, “The Case for Anglicanism in Charlotte Yonge’s Historical Fiction”, in Characters and Scenes: Studies in Charlotte M. Yonge, ed. J. Courtney and C. Schultze (Abingdon: Beechcroft Books, 2007), 145-146. This is substantially an abbreviated version of Johnston’s earlier Clio article, with a broadened focus. 9 Charlotte Mary Yonge, A Parallel History of France and England (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1871), preface. This work presented the history of the two countries in three columns, one for each nation, and a central one for events affecting both equally, in the last of which Yonge sometimes included a comparative commentary, although this tends to be largely political in emphasis. 10 The Bishops’ Bible of 1568 (revised in 1572) was the authorised establishment translation which superseded the Great Bible of 1539, and was produced as a High Church response to the more popular Geneva Bible (1560), the work of Protestant and Calvinist exiles during the reign of Mary I. 11 Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Chaplet of Pearls (1868; repr., London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1914), 12. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 19. 14 Ibid., 27. 15 Charlotte Mary Yonge, History of France (1878; this ed., repr. of 1882 New York: D. Appleton and Co., Dodo Press, n.d.), 35. The text which I am referring to here is an American edition of the history primer which Yonge produced for J.R. Green’s series, rather than the text which she produced almost simultaneously (published in 1879) for E.A. Freeman, which is discussed by Walton in “Charlotte Yonge and the ‘Historic Harem’ of Edward Augustus Freeman”. 16 Yonge, Chaplet, 57. 17 Yonge, History of France, 37. 18 Yonge, Chaplet, 33. 19 Ibid., 28. 20 Ibid. 50-1, 55. 21 Ibid., 94. 22 Ibid., 98, 106-7. 23 Ibid, 119-21, 219. 24 Ibid., 151-2. 25 Ibid., 157. 26 Ibid., 264-5, 268-9. 27 Yonge, History of France, 34. 28 Yonge, Chaplet, 266.

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Ibid, 186-193. Yonge, History of France, 36. 31 Yonge, Chaplet, 201. 32 Ibid., 246-50. 33 Ibid., 301-23. 34 Ibid., 250-1, 263-4. 35 Ibid., 330-1, 341. 36 Ibid., 330-38. 37 Ibid., 348-53. 38 Ibid., 39-42. 39 Ibid., 86-7. 40 Ibid., 159-62. 41 Ibid., 173, 177-8. 42 Ibid., 255-62, 362. 43 Yonge, History of France, 40. 44 Charlotte Mary Yonge, A Book of Golden Deeds (1864; repr., London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1879), 246-252. 45 Yonge, Parallel History, 35. Yonge’s more sympathetic perspective on French Catholicism (and, indeed, French Protestantism) may well have been at least partially influenced by her 1869 visit to France, when she stayed en famille with the French historian and politician, Guizot, a moderate Protestant who had a great deal of sympathy with and respect for both contemporary and seventeenth-century French Gallican Catholics. See Christabel Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters (London: Macmillan and Co., 1903), 235-264. 46 Charlotte Mary Yonge, Stray Pearls; the Memoirs of Margaret de Ribaumont, Viscountess of Bellaise (1883; repr., London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1894), 4. 47 Ibid., 31-2. 48 She takes a very similar line in her History of France, too, where again Bossuet is characterised largely as a preacher: History of France, 47. 49 Yonge, Stray Pearls, 50. 50 Ibid., 52-55. 51 Geoffrey Rowell, The Vision Glorious: Themes and Personalities of the Catholic Revival in Anglicanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 119-23. 52 Yonge, Stray Pearls, 73-4. 53 Ibid., 62. 54 Ibid., 96. Yonge gives a very bleak picture of the condition of the seventeenthcentury French peasantry in her History of France too, arguing that this oppressive feudal and royal regime laid the foundations for the French Revolution: 44, 47. 55 Yonge, Stray Pearls, 105-7, 136-7. 56 Ibid., 263. 57 Ibid., 136-7, 152-3. 58 Ibid., 242, 245. 59 Ibid., 214-5, 253-8. 60 Ibid., 114-7. 61 Ibid., 118-21. 30

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Ibid., 136, 355-61. Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason 1648-1789 (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970), 25. 64 Yonge, Stray Pearls, 400. 65 Ibid., 158. 66 Yonge, History of France, 45-48. 67 Yonge, Stray Pearls, 134-6. 68 Ibid., 237-38, 337-39, 348-49, 379-82. 69 Ibid, 413-4. 70 Ibid., 130-1, 214-5, 139. 71 Ibid., 414-8. 72 Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Release, or Caroline’s French Kindred (1896; repr., London: Macmillan and Co, 1899), Preface, v. 73 Ibid., 12. 74 Ibid., 23. 75 Ibid., 17. 76 Ibid., 27, 29. 77 Ibid., 78. 78 Ibid., 96, 111. 79 Ibid., 94. 80 Ibid., 112, 118, 119-20. 81 Ibid., 121. 82 Ibid., 143, 148. 83 Ibid., 186. 84 Ibid., 188. 85 Ibid., 194. 86 Ibid., 292-7. 87 Yonge, A Book of Golden Deeds, 300-328. By contrast, while she does emphasize the anti-aristocratic policies, the high death toll of the Terror, and the violent suppression of the Vendée in her History of France, Yonge’s treatment of the French Revolution here (54-60) is notably restrained and neutral in tone: indeed, the oppressive character of the ancien régime and the longterm benefits for the French peasantry of the Revolution are highlighted, which may suggest that the influence of Yonge’s editor, the democratic and anti-institutional historian J.R. Green, was exercised here. 88 Yonge, Release, 281-86. 89 Ibid., 287. 90 Ibid., 210-6. 91 Ibid., 231-2. 92 Ibid., 233-4. 93 Ibid., 227-8. 94 Ibid., 269. 95 Ibid., 303-4. 96 Ibid, 236-9. 97 Ibid., 142. 63

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Ibid., 298-302. It could be argued that this apparently ecumenical attitude is much less evident in Charlotte M. Yonge’s Reasons Why I am a Catholic and Not a Roman Catholic (1901), where she calls for believers in both traditions to admit their lack of full understanding of the other, and to continue to worship in their own ways. Perkin, in his Theology and the Victorian Novel, denies that there is in this publication any “hint of the increasing sympathy for specifically Roman Catholic beliefs and practices” apparent among other late Victorian Anglo-Catholics (80). But it might be argued that, in The Release, the ageing Yonge demonstrates considerably more understanding and sympathy than she was willing to articulate in a non-fictional and confessional work. 100 Lucy, “The Other Miss Yonge”, 96. 99

CHAPTER NINE JULES VERNE AND 1857: FROM FRENCH CRITICISM OF BRITISH COLONIALISM TO A FRANCO-BRITISH RECONCILIATION ARKIYA TOUADI

Of the French writers of the nineteenth century to have shown interest in the Indian society, Jules Verne was probably the one who produced the liveliest accounts. In La Maison à Vapeur (1880), Verne focused on the tragic episode of the Indian Revolt of 1857 and especially the Cawnpore massacre.1 Cawnpore (now Kanpur) has been a major chronotope in British colonial literature, as some fifty novels refer to 1857.2 The story takes place ten years after the massacre. Colonel Munro, who lost his wife at Cawnpore, cannot forget that day and he is still mourning his dead wife. Munro’s friend, the engineer Banks, suggests a trip through septentrional India in a modified train known as le géant d’acier or steam house, a mechanical elephant which pulls two carriages. Munro is enthusiastic, as he believes that the trip will offer him his last opportunity to take his revenge and kill the leader of the insurrection: Nana Sahib. Munro and Banks are accompanied by Captain Hod and Maucler, the French narrator. The reader follows the group through their various adventures onboard la machine à vapeur. Kâlagani, a disciple of Nana Sahib, joins Munro and his friends on board the steam house, and drives them to Nana Sahib. Munro is finally captured and during his captivity he meets a woman: la Flamme Errante. We guess that this woman is Lady Munro, who managed to escape the well of Cawnpore, a mass grave where two hundred British victims were buried. She has lost her memory and cannot recognize her husband. The story ends after several incidents. Munro succeeds in escaping with his wife and Nana Sahib, who is captured, perishes in the explosion of the mechanical elephant.

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Despite his celebration of the important role of the innovative railway in the novel, Jules Verne is very critical of British colonialism: he sees 1857 as evidence of the superior character of the French colonial system. My project here is to consider the ways in which Verne criticizes British colonialism and how he eventually comes to side with the system, which he seems to have understood, in spite of its flaws. Through his novel, the author showcases his own reading of the revolt and proves that the reasons for this mutiny are quite unclear. He points out that British colonialism, which, according to him, is based on harshness, compares unfavourably with French rule, which is more respectful of human rights. Then, through the only two female characters of the novel, Jules Verne contrasts two Indian visions of women—the virangana and the sati—and explains why the former should be destroyed while the latter should be protected. Verne’s vision of women, however, is quite similar to the British one, which shows the limits of his anti-colonial commitment. Indeed, it is apparent that the Western vision of women is similar to the Western vision of the colonized other in the case of both British and French commentators. Finally, the victory of Munro and his friends over Nana Sahib is compared with the East India Company’s victory over the mutineers, which can be seen as a Franco-British reconciliation in the name of the necessary unity of Westerners against Eastern insurrections.

The Sepoy Insurrection as the Consequence of British Colonialism The opening of the novel is devoted to British colonialism, and the whys and hows of this event are immediately the focus of the writer’s and the reader’s attention. Why did this insurrection start in India? What caused the sepoys to revolt in 1857? Verne begins with some background information, pointing out that the Portuguese and the French were already in India when the British settled there. In the seventeenth century, when the influence of the Portuguese began to diminish, the British seized this opportunity to develop, as Verne describes it, “un premier essai d’administration politique et militaire.”3 The French wanted to create their own administration as well, but Verne argues that they had to yield India to the British. The author does not mention the Treaty of Paris (1815), and prefers to let the reader believe that the French simply left the country: in fact, the five colonies of the eastern coast of India were returned to French control. The first reason given to justify the sepoy insurrection of 1857 is hatred: “la haine des envahis contre les envahisseurs”.4 In short, the

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reciprocal hatred between the colonizing empire and the colonized population could be an argument justifying the uprising. Jules Verne implies that the French were liked in India, whereas the British were hated. A second, more specific reason is also advanced, though: the British purposely greased the Enfield rifles with pig fat for the Muslim soldiers and with cow fat for the Hindus.5 The sepoys’ reaction is therefore justified, and so is their mutiny: Dans un pays où les populations renoncent à se server même de savon, parce que la graisse d’un animal sacré ou vil peut entrer dans sa composition, l’emploi de cartouches enduites de cette substance—cartouches qu’il fallait déchirer avec les lèvres—devait être difficilement accepté.6

This practice generated anger among the sepoys as it was an insult to their cult and faith. The use of such a tactic was also the sign of religious barriers that both camps had to handle. The reader is provided with various information, precise dates, and accounts of key events—yet, surprisingly, the Doctrine of Lapse introduced by Lord Dalhousie, Governor General of India from 1848 to 1856, is not mentioned by Verne. Dalhousie wanted to annex states when their rulers had died without natural heirs.7 The Doctrine gives a good insight of Dalhousie’s intentions in India: he aimed at full control over the Indian states which had no “regular” heirs,8 or which were controlled by “incompetent” rulers.9 Consequently, considerable antipathy towards Dalhousie and his Doctrine was prevalent in India. Among the people directly affected by this doctrine was Nana Sahib, the ruler of Cawnpore. The famous massacres at this site are narrated as follows in Verne’s text: Le 27 juin, à Cawnpore, première hécatombe de victimes de tout âge et sexe, fusillées ou noyées—prélude de l’épouvantable drame qui allait s’accomplir quelques semaines plus tard. Le 15 juillet, second massacre à Cawnpore. Ce jour là, plusieurs centaines d’enfants et de femmes—et parmi celles-ci lady Munro,—sont égorgées avec une cruauté sans égale par les ordres du Nana lui-même, qui appela à son aide les bouchers musulmans des abattoirs.10

This emotive report and its version of the events is clearly totally influenced by the British version of the event. Only one year after the conflict, Charles Ball published The Indian Mutiny—Giving a Detailed Account of the Sepoy Insurrection in India, and a Concise History of the Great Military Events Which have Tended to Consolidate British Empire in Hindostan.11 Ball illustrated, with engravings, all the most significant events highlighted in the novel, and gave one of the first colonialist

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interpretations of 1857. It was thus natural for Verne and his contemporaries to credit that such atrocities happened the way in which Charles Ball described them. In a sense, all the information provided by British commentators was simply transcribed into Verne’s novel. Even if the text comes from the British colonial report, the chapter focused on the sepoys’ insurrection is nevertheless critical of British colonialism and admits that the reasons usually invoked as the causes of the revolt are superficial. Besides, one of the secondary characters, M. Grandidier, explains: Les Anglais ont été heureux de rencontrer dans ce grand et magnifique pays un peuple doux, industrieux et civilisé, et de longue date façonné à tous les jougs. Mais qu’ils y prennent garde, la douceur a ses limites, et que le joug ne soit pas écrasant, ou les têtes se redressent un jour et le brisent.12

The Indians are here presented as a civilized, gentle, and long-suffering people, who have endured colonialization first by the Portuguese, then by the French; it is only under English rule, and because of inept administration of the country, that the Indians are obliged to revolt. The pressure which the British put on the colonized people was such that the revolt was entirely justified. The narrator also adds that what happened under British colonialism would not have happened under French rule. The fact that the story of the revolt is told by the Frenchman Maucler (whose name sounds like mot clair, which means “the clear word”) invites the reader to wonder if this French narrator is about to give a clearer, more unbiased vision of 1857. The choice of this particular name could also imply that French is a clear language, superior to other confused foreign languages: the language of Enlightenment and the Great Revolution. Accordingly, this interpretation is clearly mediated through the superior means of French rationality. In Verne’s novel Nana Sahib expresses himself, and thus, through his character, the Indian point of view is voiced, something which was actually missing after the insurrection.13 In the narrative, the British yoke appears too harsh: consequently Nana Sahib’s hatred and the 1857 uprising are justified. The narrator is there to arbitrate in the conflict between the Indians and the British. The French also suffered from British colonialism, the text implies, in particular from its unjustified and expensive fees. Since the Treaty of Paris in 1815, the five French territories (Pondichéry, Chandernagor, Karikal, Yanaon and Mahé) had had to pay substantial fees which seemed unfair to the French. In that sense, the French completely understood the Indian position and empathized with their feelings of hatred against British rule.

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Even though Verne is known for being an Anglophile, he shows great admiration for people ready to fight against British rule. The novel includes a whole chapter entitled “La Révolte des Cipayes” in which all the important events are described in a journalistic and lively style, with precise dates and places. The narrator enumerates the different massacres in a chronological order, using the present tense to create an impression of immediacy. He even inserts the example of Lady Munro’s murder to express his feelings. The narrator mentions Mirat, Delhi, Nourabad, Allahabad, Gwalior, and Cawnpore,14 and claims that public opinion in Europe registered extreme shock in response to the British reaction to the uprising: A Cawnpore après le massacre, le colonel Neil obligeait les condamnés, avant de les livrer au gibet, à lécher et nettoyer de leur langue, proportionnellement à leur rang de caste, chaque tâche de sang restée dans la maison où les victimes avaient péri. C’était pour ces Indous faire précéder la mort par le déshonneur.15

Through this example, Verne emphasized that the British took their revenge, using humiliation as a weapon against their enemies. This repression led to severe criticism from contemporaries, including William Gladstone who protested in Parliament, and Verne was not slow to include this detail: “Terribles représailles contre lesquelles, non sans raison peut être, M. Gladstone protesta avec énergie au parlement anglais.”16 Newspapers in France called on the French to join the insurrection, and Karl Marx wrote about the injustice of British imperialism.17 But the text does not question French colonialism and its mission in India and the narrator remains reticent about the negative influence of France as a colonizer in other parts of the world. Is it this implicit colonial connection between the British and the French which brings the narrator to adopt some British views on women in India?

Women's Place in the Novel: The Rani of Jhansi versus La Flamme Errante In all his works Jules Verne gives a secondary role to women.18 The absence of women is explained by the French writer Julien Gracq, who suggests at least two main reasons. Firstly, Jules Verne wrote about “les voyages extraordinaires”, and did not view women as acceptable participants in dangerous adventures. Gracq suggests that Verne believed in setting love stories in a secondary location, not in the jungle, for instance.19 Secondly, for Verne the question of sex is a taboo or perhaps

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rather a sacred subject: in his works, sex is never depicted, only suggested, and then only between married people.20 Gracq adds an important rider, however: Les femmes en réalité se virilisent un peu ... chez les héroïnes de Jules Vernes, et même souvent. Ce sont des femmes héroïques qui prennent parfois sur elles une tâche que les hommes ont abandonnée et elles se proposent des travaux d’Hercule à leur manière.21

In La Maison à Vapeur the only two important female characters are the Rani of Jhansi, Nana Sahib’s wife in Verne’s version, and La Flamme Errante, Munro’s wife. Each character corresponds respectively to a specific Indian vision of women: the virangana and the sati. The virangana is a warrior woman, whereas the sati is a submissive woman who chooses to sacrifice herself on the funeral bier of her dead husband. English colonial ideology embodied this fundamental dichotomy: India was perceived as an innocent woman (the sati) who had to be colonized and protected from the wild forces at work in Indian culture (the virangana). The Rani of Jhansi is clearly a virangana and this character—Jules Verne’s creation—is virile and heroic. This fierce queen refuses to follow the sati tradition when her husband, with whom she enjoys a close relationship, dies. Instead, she decides to assume the regency for her adopted son, Damodar Rao III. La Flamme Errante is depicted in an entirely contrasting fashion: Cette femme n’a pas sa raison. Sa tête ne lui appartient plus; ses yeux ne regardent pas ce qu’ils voient ; ses oreilles n’écoutent pas ce qu’elles entendent ; sa langue ne sait plus prononcer une parole ! Elle est ce que serait une aveugle, une sourde, une muette pour toutes ces choses en dehors. C’est une folle, et, une folle c’est une morte qui continue à vivre!22

This woman has clearly lost her senses, and commands respect for that reason: “She is mad and a mad person is a dead person who continues to live”.23 To all intents and purposes, she is a sati who has already committed suicide, becoming a sacred flame. The text insists on the tragic consequences of the Cawnpore massacre and underlines the fragility of the sati. This type of woman needs to be protected and this vision is shared by the Indians who, for instance, feed la Flamme Errante. She is not seen as a danger and when Nana Sahib’s brother, Balao Rao, is worried about her presence in the Pâl of Tandît, his friend reassures him: the sati is not to be feared. On the contrary, it is the virangana who inspires fear. Kathryn Hansen in Grounds for Play: The Nauntanki Theatre of North India gives a useful definition of the virangana, arguing that “the virangana's status is

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not defined by her relationship to a man as wife, widow, or paramour but is consequent upon her valorous deeds.”24 For her, this type of Indian woman possesses qualities such as moral and physical strength and sexual freedom. For Hindu Indians, the vision of the virangana is not as negative as for the colonizers. Obviously there is in the text a lack of information on the Rani and history is altered in the story. For instance, even though it is unknown who killed the Rani on the battlefield, Munro is named as her slayer, and Nana Sahib is made responsible for the Cawnpore Massacre and Lady Munro’s death. Each man is a representative of his country, and in the same way the Rani of Jhansi and la Flamme Errante symbolise their countries. As a wild woman, the Rani is presented as a dangerous person and like Nana Sahib—also a representative of the Hindus—she is compared to an animal. This characterisation of Indian people is also found in works such as Charles Ball’s history of the insurgency, which suggest that, as animals, the Indians need to be civilized and tamed. By contrast, la Flamme Errante is depicted as a heroic victim. Jules Verne insists on her courage and compassion at Cawnpore: La jeune femme montra un dévouement sans bornes pour ses compagnons d’infortune. Elle les soigna de ses mains, elle les aida de sa bourse, elle les encouragea par son exemple et ses paroles, elle se montra ce qu’elle était, un grand cœur, et, comme je vous l’ai dit, une femme héroïque.25

What is particularly interesting in this description is the strong personality of Lady Munro. She is depicted as a heroic woman, ready to die for her country: believing that she will die, she continues to encourage and support others. This imprisonment lasted three weeks from 7 to 27 June. She is the perfect heroic Victorian wife, an image closer to the devoted sati rather than to the virangana who looks more like “the mad woman in the attic”. At the end of the story, la Flamme Errante recovers her memory and identity. The depiction of these two contrasting women is the means by which Verne expresses the mission of the English in India: to fight the virangana and protect the sati. La Flamme Errante is wandering like a ghost and her image, drawn by the artist Léon Bennet, emphasizes the vision of a powerless woman. Did Jules Verne accept this British colonial vision of women as an ideological site on which to base a reconciliation between the French and the British?

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The Death of Nana Sahib as a Means of Reconciliation? Gradually, in Verne’s tale, the interpretation of British colonialism becomes more and more sympathetic and understanding. If the narrator shows admiration for Nana Sahib at the very beginning of La Maison à Vapeur, at the end of the story he seems to develop a real empathy with the British characters. Being the only French character of the novel, Maucler, who is first an observer and acts as a referee, becomes the companion of the British and shows compassion to Munro and his friends, functioning as a projection of the author himself. One of the major themes of the novel is hunting. Colonel Munro, Captain Hod and the engineer Banks hunt lions, tigers, and keep track of their feats in written records. As mentioned earlier, Nana Sahib—because he is an Indian—is compared to an animal. His friend Kâlagani who, because of his origin, is also assimilated to an animal, is hunted by Captain Hod: indeed, Hod includes Kâlagani among the fifty tigers he has tracked down and killed.26 Literally speaking, the British characters go hunting. But on a metaphorical level, this activity also reveals their domineering attitude towards the colonized populations. It is a master/slave relationship in which the Indians, because they are subjugated to British authority, become beasts and lose their humanity: on this ground the hunt is justified. In the novel, the various animals which appear are seen as a huge threat to the foreigners. Thanks to Nana Sahib’s interventionary voice, the reader knows in advance that the latter wants to revolt again against the British and take his revenge on Colonel Munro, who has killed the Rani of Jhansi on the battlefield. Cette redoutable reine, toute dévouée au nabab, sa plus fidèle compagne pendant l’insurrection, fut tuée de la main même de Sir Edward Munro. Nana Sahib sur le cadavre de lady Munro, à Cawnpore, le colonel sur le cadavre de la Rani, à Gwalior, c’étaient là deux hommes en qui se résumaient la révolte et la répression, deux ennemis dont la haine aurait des effets terribles, s’ils se retrouvaient jamais face à face.27

The narrator informs the reader that beyond the natural hatred between the colonizers and the colonized people, these two men hate each other because of the death of two women: Lady Munro, supposedly killed by Nana Sahib, and the Rani of Jhansi, killed by Munro. This parallel is ideological in so far as it equates the hatred of the colonized with the hatred of the colonizer, concealing the fact that one is an oppressor and the other the oppressed. The reader knows that Lady Munro managed to

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escape the well and that since then, she has been wandering about with a torch and has unconsciously led the British soldiers to Nana Sahib’s refuge, where his brother was killed. She is therefore the one who brings revenge, which is one of the functions of the virangana, but she is an essentially British version who fights for her country without ferocity or loss of femininity. The encounter between Nana Sahib and Munro eventually happens at the end of the novel. Thanks to Kâlagani, Nana Sahib is able to take his revenge which is symbolic, as it mirrors the punishment which the Hindus received at Cawnpore. Reconciliation between the British and French colonizers comes gradually in the novel. For instance, Maucler who is not a hunter by nature helps Munro, Banks, and Colonel Neil fight Nana Sahib’s friends at the very end of the novel. The characterisation of this figure changes in the course of the story: Maucler, who is initially just an observer, progresses to a more active role—as do the French in general. All the incidents in which the characters—Munro, Banks, Neil, Maucler— are involved lead to the creation of a deeper mutual understanding between the French and the British. Why did Jules Verne want to rewrite history, assigning such a role to the French? If we consider what happened from a historical perspective, the French did not take any part in the Indian revolt. Initially, nobody believed that this revolt was serious: even the British government did not want to send troops to India, thinking that the mutineers would be rapidly neutralized. Jules Verne tries to convey a positive image of French colonialism in contradiction to British colonialism, but his tale also suggests that in a period of threat and war, France should support and side with Britain. So, symbolically, through fiction, Jules Verne may have wished to work for reconciliation. He uses his imagination to create a concluding image of a positive relationship between France and Britain— and he does it through Nana Sahib’s death. We shift from a triangular relationship—India, Britain, France—with France in the middle, to a Franco-British union against the Indians. Binary relations, which are typical of the colonial vision according to postcolonial critics, prevail. In order to do so, the concept of animalisation is reinforced at the end of the novel when all Nana Sahib’s disciples are running after the steam house to free him.28 This reminds us of the earlier scene when tigers, lions, and panthers attack Banks, Maucler, and the rest of the group at the Kraal. After the death of Kâlagani, shot by Colonel Neil, the Hindus are left alone with no chief to lead them. In the text, they are described as savages with no leaders, which will naturally lead them to a complete disorganization, reinforcing the picture of British supremacy.

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Conclusion Jules Verne began with a harsh criticism of British colonialism showing the consequences and atrocities of such a harsh and inept system. The originality of his novel is shown by the inclusion of the Indian voice, which was not fully expressed until the independence of the country. Verne even allows Kâlagani to describe the rebellion as a war of independence.29 This Indian perception, often criticized by the British, is accepted by Verne. But it is at the service of the author’s wish to spread a positive image of France and its colonialism by showing that, unlike the British, the French are true to their motto liberté, égalité, fraternité which is also applied to their colonies. Then, through the opposition of the virangana and the sati, Verne chooses to echo the British response to these Indian types of womanhood, fighting the virangana while protecting the sati, and from this basis gradually develops his attempt at reconciliation. In this process, what he says about the Rani is especially important as she appears as a character who justifies, because she is dangerous, the reconciliation of England and France. The words “Remember Cawnpore! Souviens-toi de Cawnpore” which a soldier carves with his gun on the edge of the well convey important messages.30 Firstly, the author wants to underline the tragic event which demonstrates the harshness of British colonialism: what is clearly implied by Jules Verne in his fiction is that this revolt could have been avoided under French rule. But this is not all: in addition, the unity of colonial western nations against Indian animalistic violence is suggested. The Indian heroine (the Rani) and the hero (Nana Sahib) are to be bled to death like the animals of a holocaust, on the altar of a Franco-British entente cordiale, seemingly to forge a sacred unbreakable blood bond between the two nations. In 1880, when Verne was writing his novel, France had just lost Alsace Lorraine to Germany: maybe this reconciliation at the end of the novel could be seen as an attempt to a union against the new power of Germany.

Bibliography Ball, Charles. The Indian Mutiny—Giving a Detailed Account of the Sepoy Insurrection in India, and a Concise History of the Great Military Events Which have Tended to Consolidate British Empire in Hindostan. London and New York: London Print and Publishing Company, 1858-1859.

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Blunt, A. “Embodying War: British Women and Domestic Defilement in the Indian Mutiny”. Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 3 (2000): 403-428. Chakravarty, G. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Dekiss, Jean-Paul. “Entretien avec Julien Gracq”, Revue Jules Verne, 10 (2000). Hansen, Kathrin. Grounds for Play: The Nauntanki Theatre of North India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Herbert, C. War of No Pity: the Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008. Howe, Stephen. “Colonising and Exterminating? Memories of Imperial Violence in Britain and France”. Histoire@Politique. Politique, Culture, Société, 11 (May-August, 2010): 1-18. http:///www.histoirepolitique.fr. Lebra-Chapman, Joyce. The Rani of Jhansi: A study in Female Heroism in India. Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 1986. Mazumdar, S., ed. Insurgent Sepoys: Europe Views the Revolt of 1857. New Delhi: Routledge, 2011. Paxton, N. L. “Mobilising Chivalry: Rape in British Novels about the Indian Uprising”. Victorian Studies, 36, no. 1 (Autumn, 1992): 5-30. Ramesh, Randeep. “1857 Mutiny Revisited”. The Guardian, 24 August, 2007. Verne, Jules. La Maison à Vapeur, Voyage à travers l’Inde Septentrionale. Paris: Omnibus, 2005. —. The End of Nana Sahib: The Steam House. Translated by A. D. Kingston. Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2003.

Notes 1

Other recent studies of this novel, which explore different angles on the text, appear in S. Mazumdar, ed., Insurgent Sepoys: Europe Views the Revolt of 1857 (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011): S. Choudhury, “A Great Insurrection: Jules Verne and British ‘Mutiny’ Fiction”, 237-250, compares it with British novels of the uprising, while S. Dasgupta, “Lost in Translation: Jules Verne and the Indian Rebellion”, 221-236, considers translations of the text. 2 There is now a substantial scholarly literature exploring British responses in fictional and non-fictional texts to the Great Rebellion of 1857: significant works include G. Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and C. Herbert, War of No Pity: the Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2008).

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Jules Verne, La Maison à Vapeur, Voyage à travers l’Inde Septentrionale (Paris: Omnibus, 2005), 698. 4 Ibid., 700. 5 Ibid., 702. 6 Ibid. 7 See Joyce Lebra-Chapman. The Rani of Jhansi: A study in Female Heroism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 1986), 24. The Doctrine had been highly criticized in both India and England, but it allowed the Company to take over several states such as “The Punjab, Sikkim, part of Cachar, Lower Burma, Satara, part of Sind, Oudh, the Central Provinces, Baghat, Sambalpur, Jaitpur, Udaipur, Jhansi, the Berars, and part of Kandesh.” 8 Lebra-Chapman, Rani of Jhansi, 26. “Adoptions were recognized if they were ‘regular’”. They were “regular” if made by “ancient hereditary kingdoms of India,” although how ancient was defined was not specified by Melcalfe or Dalhousie. Adoptions were not recognized—were “irregular”—when the state or ruler existed under a grant from the paramount power (England), which was thereby entitled to limit succession to terms of the grant. This sovereign or paramount power was “entitled to limit the succession and to resume on the failure of direct heir of the body”. This meant natural male heirs, which, according to Melcalfe’s minute, precluded adoption. 9 All princes were considered as “incompetent” if, according to the Company, they were not successfully managing the economy of their states. 10 Verne, La Maison à Vapeur, 703. 11 Charles Ball, The Indian Mutiny—Giving a Detailed Account of the Sepoy Insurrection in India, and a Concise History of the Great Military Events Which have Tended to Consolidate British Empire in Hindostan (London and New York: London Print and Publishing Company, 1858-1859). 12 Verne, La Maison à Vapeur, 712. 13 Although we should not forget that this is still a western colonial observer ventriloquising on behalf of the colonized people: Verne experiences here the dilemma at the centre of modern subaltern studies. 14 Verne, La Maison à Vapeur, 702-3. 15 Ibid., 707. In translation, this reads “At Cawnpore, after the massacre, Colonel Neil obliged the condemned men, before giving them over the gallows, to lick and clean with their tongues, in proportion to their rank of caste, each spot of blood remaining in the house in which the victims had perished. To the Hindoos, this was preceding death with dishonor.” Jules Verne, The End of Nana Sahib: The Steam House, trans. A. D. Kingston (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2003), 44. 16 Verne, La Maison à Vapeur, 707. 17 Randeep Ramesh, “1857 Mutiny Revisited”, The Guardian, 24 August, 2007. According to Ramesh, who is reviewing and drawing on Amaresh Misra’s highly controversial War of Civilizations: India AD 1857 (2007), L’Estafette, a French newspaper called on France to “intervene in favour of the Indians, launch all our squadrons on the seas, join our efforts with those of Russia against British India … such is the only policy truly worthy of the glorious traditions of France.”

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Meanwhile, for Karl Marx, “the question is not whether the English have a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton.” Stephen Howe points out that even some of the earliest British accounts of the suppression of the 1857 Uprising, including Sir John Kaye’s history, published in 1864-67, were explicit and condemnatory of British violence. Stephen Howe, “Colonising and Exterminating? Memories of Imperial Violence in Britain and France”, Histoire @Politique. Politique, Culture, Société, 11 (May-August, 2010): 10-11, at http:///www.histoire-politique.fr. 18 There is, of course, an extensive literature on gender ideology and representation of women and the 1857 uprising: see, for instance, N. L. Paxton, “Mobilising Chivalry: Rape in British novels about the Indian Uprising”, Victorian Studies, 36, no. 1 (Autumn, 1992): 5-30; A. Blunt, “Embodying War: British Women and Domestic Defilement in the Indian Mutiny”, Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 3 (2000), 403-428. 19 Jean-Paul Dekiss, “Entretien avec Julien Gracq”, Revue Jules Verne, 10 (2000): 43. 20 Ibid., 30. 21 Ibid., 43. 22 Verne, La Maison à Vapeur, 858. 23 My translation. 24 Kathrin Hansen, Grounds for Play: The Nauntanki Theatre of North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 189. 25 Verne, La Maison à Vapeur, 789. 26 Ibid., 1048. 27 Ibid., 709. 28 Ibid., 1043. 29 Ibid., 959. 30 Ibid., 795.

CHAPTER TEN DABS ON THE CANVAS/WORDS ON THE PAGE: THE CONVERGENCE OF PAUL CÉZANNE'S PAINTING AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S WRITING CLAIRE HUGUET

Introduction Undeniably, the period which Ernest Hemingway spent in Paris in the 1920s allowed him to become one of the most famous American modernist writers and the spokesman of the notorious “Lost Generation”. A score of studies on Hemingway have aimed at demonstrating how Paris was the springboard which launched the young American writer on the international literary scene. Thus they try to disentangle the different threads of influence that helped Hemingway to create his own idiosyncratic prose. Among the now famous mentors habitually mentioned are Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Paradoxically, what these studies usually fail to recognize, maybe because it does itself constitute a paradox, is the fact that these influences are American ones and that, on deeper consideration, it does appear that the French literary scene hardly had any kind of influence on the young American writer’s crucial formative years. While Stendhal, Flaubert, and Maupassant are several times referred to by Hemingway, no other contemporary French writers are mentioned by Hemingway in his letters or in his works. Perhaps this is because the one French artist whom Hemingway did discover while living in France and subsequently openly referred to as having had a deep influence on his writing was not a writer, but a painter who had actually been long dead when Hemingway became famous: Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). The artistic community, of which Paris was the headquarters when Hemingway and his wife arrived there in December

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1920, was characterized by an interplay, not only between different nationalities, but also between artistic media. For several decades, in fact, the then world capital of modernism had been—admittedly belatedly— following Charles Baudelaire’s advice, according to which “the arts aspire, if not to complement one another, at least to lend one another new energies.”1 The ideal categories of art were, indeed, thus breaking down and giving birth to new hybrid forms such as the collage, Guillaume Apollinaire’s “caligrammes”, and the prose or imagist poem. To become an artist was to transcend any categorization of arts: painters became poets, musicians, painters. Modernist writers were trying to break down the wall between the verbal art, seen as temporal, and the visual arts, seen as spatial. Artists thus seemed to be working toward a single synaesthetic art. It is precisely this same idea of a synaesthetic art that lies at the heart of Paul Cézanne’s work, making him an influential subject of study for nearly all modern schools of painting, despite his death in obscurity in 1906. And beyond painting, his influence spread to literature. In his autobiography, the poet William Carlos Williams thus wrote: “It was the work of the painters following Cézanne and the Impressionists that, critically, opened up the age of Stein, Joyce and a good many others.”2 Among whom one could add Ernest Hemingway. Before Hemingway reached Paris, there is no real indication that he had any deep interest in the pictorial arts, sculpture, or architecture. But, as Alfred Kazin wrote, “Painting was the decisive experience for an American abroad.”3 On different, now famous, occasions, Hemingway referred to Paul Cézanne’s paintings as being an important inspiration for his own work. In a letter to Gertrude Stein written in August 1924, Hemingway said that he had been “trying to do the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit.”4 We also know that he borrowed Ambroise Vollard’s biography of Cézanne at Sylvia Beach’s “Shakespeare & Co”.5 The most extended reference Hemingway made to Cézanne is in an interview by Lilian Ross published in The New Yorker in November 1949, in which he admitted that “Cézanne is my painter after the early painters.” And I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne. I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.6

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But what also characterized Hemingway’s references to Cézanne was his refusal to explain exactly in what this influence consisted. In an interview with George Plimpton, he made the mystery explicit: I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day to explain. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.7

Or in A Moveable Feast: I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimension I was trying to put in them. I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides, it was a secret.8

His assertion that “they [the painters] were a part of learning to see, to hear, to think, to feel and not feel, and to write”,9 does confirm the fact that the study of painting allowed Hemingway to expand his sensibilities and consequently to increase the sensual quality of his prose. But it is no great help in explaining the exact scope and the mechanics of the influence exerted by the French artist’s paintings on the American writer’s texts. Some literary critics have tried to explain the specific nature of this influence. The first article dates back to 1970, the latest one was published only a few years ago. All aim at showing that, while Hemingway’s style was undeniably shaped by the famous Kansas City Star manual, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, Paul Cézanne emerges as a subtler but perhaps more significant influence whose methods appear on a deeper level to have guided Hemingway’s fundamental approaches to his craft. There are, however, several major obstacles which some critics do not always take into account and that cannot always be overcome. Firstly, we need to identify the works by Cézanne that Hemingway actually saw. Hemingway never identified the specific works of Cézanne that had influenced his own creative vision: he gives few clues as to which artworks taught him what. This leads some scholars to discuss Cézanne’s work as a whole, and others to take into account only Cézanne’s “representative” works. Hemingway saw at least some forty to fifty Cézannes in Paris between 1922 and 1924: two were at the Luxembourg Museum, nine at the Louvre, and thirty at temporary exhibitions, not to mention those which he saw in Gertrude Stein’s apartment. Secondly, a distinction needs to be made between common features which pre-exist the discovery of one artist by another, and the genuine influences the former can have on the latter. The fact that Cézannes painted sixty versions of Mont Sainte-Victoire and that

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Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, even if Hemingway said that writing was as difficult “as painting a Cézanne”, does not say much about the influence the French painter had on the American writer. Finally, of course, one has to deal with the tricky problem of the possibility of transposing one art’s techniques to another. Undeniably, when we read we create mental pictures based on the descriptions which we read. However, as Emily Watts admits, “The aesthetic leap from one art form to another, or the incorporation of elements and techniques of one art form into another, is a difficult one.”10 She rightly asks, “How closely can words approach paint?”,11 while Meyly Chin Hagemann wonders “how visual language may become literary structures.”12 In this respect, the vagueness of the vocabulary used by the critics to describe this “leap” from one art to another is quite revealing of the anxiety any study of artistic influence breeds. The verbs employed go from the rather neutral “transpose”, “transfer”, “transcribe”, to the more mysterious “incorporate”, “duplicate”, “adapt”, and especially “metamorphose”. The difficulty of identifying the exact ways in which the painter influenced the writer has led some critics, it seems, to distort Hemingway’s prose to make it suit a pictorial analogy with Cézanne’s painting. Here I would like to show how Cézanne’s influence was decisive for Hemingway to the extent that it allowed him firstly to put his medium in perspective, and secondly, take this very perspective as the basis of the realistic effect of his landscape descriptions, which most of the time represented mountains. But, thirdly, it is interesting to see that, while mountains came to be the French painter’s exclusive and obsessive subject of representation, they literally recede in the background of the American writer’s later works, which may be seen as a sign of the receding influence Cézanne’s work had on Hemingway’s.

Putting the Medium and Reality into Perspective In Our Time (1925)—Hemingway’s first major work—called the possibility of writing into question in a radical way. Only by distancing himself from his writing, by putting it in perspective as he would look at a painting, could the writer make sure that he has the upper hand on his prose. Toward the end of Cézanne’s career, the painter left small areas of canvas blank, as if he no longer managed to have his patches of colour touch one another. Early in his career, Cézanne wanted to avoid them at any cost: “There must not be even one loose stitch, a gap where emotion, light, and truth can escape … I bring together all the scattered elements

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with the same energy and the same faith.”13 The white patches may thus be seen as the painter’s ultimate paradoxical representation of the failure of his medium to meet with the artist’s desire for expression. But the French painter came to see these white patches as a powerful representation of the suggestive dimension his art was meant to convey, an expression refined to the point that it leaves no trace behind, the obviousness of its meaning making it transparent. This is how Patrick Heron, like many other art critics, has interpreted “the white areas which lie scattered thick as archipelagoes”: I would almost say that in them the expression is at its most intense; that it is precisely the white patches that are most potent in form … White is where he dared not tread: the vital node of every form, where false statement would destroy the whole. White is the unstateable core of each coloured snowstorm of definition; and its potency derives from the fact that the slanting stroke at the perimeter throws definition inward, adds meaning to the white!14

The first undesirable blanks that had to be filled ended up delineating the limit beyond which the medium could express without mediating. In the same way, in his interview with George Plimpton, Hemingway explained how, in his view, the writer should avoid “holes” in his narratives, but nevertheless build his text around suggestive omissions: “Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.”15 In the same interview he thus elaborated on the definition of his famous “iceberg theory”: “you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”16 Just as viewers unconsciously fill in small patches of blank canvas in a Cézanne landscape, so do we guess what Hemingway implies but does not explicitly say. Interestingly enough, this theory seems to have been inspired by painting. Indeed, Hemingway ended his statement adding: “people will understand the same way that they will do in painting. It only takes time…” What is certain is that Hemingway most ambitiously applied his theory of omission in the stories which he wrote while getting every day more and more acquainted with Cézanne’s works in the Luxembourg Museum and in the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, the latter of which exhibited works by Cézanne in which the painter left small areas of canvas blank. The short stories “Out of Season” and especially “Big Two-Hearted River” are famous applications of the iceberg theory. In the latter, the unspoken goal of Nick Adams’s fishing

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trip is to go back to the Michigan countryside of his childhood in order to forget about the trauma he went through as a soldier in Europe during the First World War. The omission embodies the unspeakable. Silence is concretely represented in In Our Time in the interruptions that separate the short stories and “vignettes” that alternate throughout the book. This discontinuous, fragmented text, just like Cézanne’s later paintings, could be seen as being in the course of being built, aiming at literally filling the blanks, and bringing all the threads of the stories together. But it could just as well be seen as a fragile whole on the edge of dissolving into an undifferentiated silence. Silence and whiteness are both the starting point and the horizon of Cézanne’s and Hemingway’s art, a way of challengingly going beyond mere words and brushstrokes. They are both a negation of expression and its most refined form: that is, the point at which the means of communication manages to erase itself completely behind its content.17 They also strikingly embody the deceptive simplicity of Hemingway’s and Cézanne’s artworks. Paring language down to its simplest expression paradoxically calls attention to it and shows its irreducible character. Indeed, the unstable state of Cézanne’s late painting, which wavers between showing the powerlessness of its medium and reaching an expression that is beyond painting, characterized Hemingway’s first major work. It was by putting his own medium in perspective with Cézanne’s painting that the young Hemingway dramatically realized the limits of his own art and consequently became even more demanding of himself. For Cézanne, as for Hemingway, the artist thus could not but take into account his medium’s undeniable shortcomings and occasional impotence, while still stubbornly aiming at an expression powerful enough to suggest ultimately most of its meaning. It is not alone in his use of meaningful omissions that Hemingway’s work draws on the techniques of the French painter whom he so admired. In the 1880s, the Impressionist movement became characterized by paintings which were flat rather than illusionistic, surfaces which declared themselves first of all as surfaces. Cézanne spent most of the decade developing a pictorial language that would reconcile flatness and illusionism. Each of Cézanne’s work aims at being a convincing, that is realistic, representation of a landscape. But at the same time, Cézanne never allows his viewer to forget about the fact that what they are observing is nothing but a picture which is forever trying to look like reality. His painting forces the viewer to adopt a perspective on the artistic medium before taking in the vista on nature. The second one always presupposes the first one in his art.

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In the same way, Hemingway was regarded both as a realist and a modernist, and mainly thanks to his close study of Cézanne’s paintings. Hemingway referred to Cézanne’s pictorial art to define his own work and to make his reader consider his prose writing from another angle, with the eyes of a painter. To that extent, he was a modernist. But he also used the French painter’s pictorial technique to create the realistic illusion he meant to convey, especially in his landscape descriptions and mainly in the novels that followed In Our Time. In a letter to Edmund Wilson written in October 1924, Hemingway spoke of the composition of In Our Time in terms of perspective: I’ve worked like hell most of the time and think the stuff gets better. Finished the book of 14 stories with a chapter of In Our Time between each story—that is the way they were meant to go—to give the picture of the whole between examining it in detail. Like looking with your eyes at something, say a passing coastline, and then looking at it with 15 × binoculars. Or rather, maybe, looking at it and living in it, and then coming out and looking at it again.18

The alternation between realism “living in it” and considering his work as a picture “looking at it again” is striking. It reminds us of the end of the deleted section of “Big Two-Hearted River”, in which Nick, after admitting having written the story and consequently the landscape descriptions that make up an important part of the story, ended up “moving in the picture”: the text is realistic (since Nick can move in it), but also an artifact (it is nothing but a picture). Hemingway’s quotation from the letter to Edmund Wilson also reminds us of the fact that Cézanne thought that, in composition, one thing was as important as another: each part was as important as the whole. It also seems to be an application of Cézanne’s principle that the most important thing, with a painting, was to find the right distance. Even more importantly, In Our Time seems to literally apply the new type of spatial pattern Cézanne had developed. Instead of adhering to the traditional focalized system of perspective, the painter portrayed objects from shifting viewpoints. Specifically, he explored the effects in painting of precisely a binocular vision: the fact that two slightly different simultaneous visual perceptions provide us with a depth perception and a complex knowledge of spatial relationships. We see two different views simultaneously. Cézanne thus transformed earlier ideas of single-point perspective. Now In Our Time precisely consists in the simultaneous vision of two periods of a life literally shattered by the explosion of a mortar shell that actually wounded Hemingway in Italy in July 1918. The American writer’s first book of fiction thus tried to grasp

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in one single perception his own recent past as a soldier, conveyed through the vignettes, and his now apparently remote innocent childhood, described through the short stories. Hemingway transposed Cézanne’s binocular vision to represent his divided, fragmented past and to make sense out of it. More tentatively, we might suggest that Hemingway used the alternation between blanks, short stories, and vignettes, just as Cézanne used a very limited range of colours in his paintings. The art critic Roger Fry explained that colour was seen by Cézanne “not as an adjunct to form, as something imposed upon form, but as itself a direct exponent of form.”19 Cézanne disagreed with the Impressionists’ modeling principle, according to which a painter showed volume by modeling lights and shadows. In Cézanne’s paintings, a limited range of colours are juxtaposed: some tend to recede into the background while others seem to come to the fore, the contrast giving to the viewer a realistic impression of volume. In the same way, there are no traditional light and shades in Hemingway’s landscapes: he was seldom concerned with the sun as a source of light, or with shades as a means of contrasting or giving form. Even more interestingly, it could be argued that Hemingway built In Our Time, just as Cézanne did his paintings, through juxtaposition of colours, a contrast between not even colours but shades of black (the vignettes), grey (the short stories), and white (the interruptions between them). Through this alternation, rather than, as with Cézanne, reconciling art’s capacity for illusion with its self-reflexivity, In Our Time seems to neutralize both. This contrast allowed Hemingway to represent strikingly the shades in the spectrum of prose writing: from silence (the interruptions between the short stories and the vignettes) to fiction (the short stories) to silence again and then a more refined, more concentrated imagist text which verges on poetry (the vignettes), and back to the blank which, in these recurring cycles, can be interpreted both as a culmination of expression (when it follows the “vignettes”) and as the failure of language (when it precedes the short stories). In Our Time ends on a short story entitled “Big Two Hearted-River” that is divided into two parts, as a reminder and pictorial representation of the fact that silence, like Cézanne’s patches of white, is literally at the heart of expression, both as its starting-point and ultimate form. Cézanne and Hemingway were both undeniably acutely aware of both the illusionistic powers of their respective medium and their limitations. This tension was staged in Cézanne’s work in his landscape descriptions, and this thematic choice seems to have become in turn the young American writer’s work’s own aesthetic battleground.

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Landscape Description: From Realism to Abstraction Initially, Hemingway’s landscape description may appear to be imitative and mimetic, but it is not, and this seems to be indisputably the result of Cézanne’s influence. Both artists wished to produce reality in the sense that they wanted to describe a landscape that any reader or viewer might recognize; both were undeniably inspired by the landscapes of their childhood. However, if one compares the description of the country in “Up in Michigan”, Hemingway’s first published story in 1922, and “Big TwoHearted River”, one can see how the close study of Cézanne’s painting led Hemingway to move from a “photographic realism”, in which elements that are not functional are nonetheless included in the description, to a more simplified and more meaningful description.20 More specifically, it can be argued that Hemingway’s character in “Big Two-Hearted River” sees what some of Cézanne’s paintings show: namely, a complex foreground and a simplified background. The parallel is particularly striking if one looks at Cézanne’s Bay of Marseilles, Seen from L’Estaque (c.1885). The painting, which was in the Luxembourg Museum when Hemingway was in Paris, represents trees and several houses that seem to be built very close to one another, to the point of being sometimes hard to distinguish. By contrast, the background consists only of far-off mountains which are clearly separated from the foreground by the sea the blue of which, just as that of the sky, seems to run into the colour of this natural landscape. In the same way, in “Big Two-Hearted River”, most of the time the foreground is filled with Nick’s campsite which is described in detail. By contrast, the background is mainly made up of swamps, which do have a symbolic function, but are nevertheless merely mentioned: Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette … Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country … As he smoked, his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock.21

The country remains vaguely in the background while the narrator’s and consequently the reader’s perspective is realistically limited to his nearest surrounding. Beyond this, like Cézanne, Hemingway also learnt to be selective in the details he gives to build up the foreground of the scene. But in his descriptions of panoramic views, Cézanne’s influence can also be detected. It is true that in “Big Two-Hearted River”, the panoramic view which the character has of the landscape stretched out before him is merely hinted at: “Ahead of him, as far as he could see, ….” or also “Far

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off to the left was the line of the river. Nick followed it with his eye and caught glints of the water in the sun.”22 By contrast, in Hemingway’s later novels, the characters often stop the movement of the narration and view the land surrounding them. They then have a broad and comprehensive view of nature, which sometimes goes beyond the character’s consciousness to become impersonal. And Hemingway’s specific view of the land, primarily his mountain landscape, is strikingly composed by means of some of Cézanne’s own pictorial techniques. Hemingway seems to use what one could describe as Cézanne’s own “grammar” of space. Indeed, like Cézanne, as Emily Watts convincingly demonstrated, Hemingway sometimes used a series of planes cut across by a diagonal line made up of a road, a river or a line of trees, to create an impression of depth. For instance, in The Sun Also Rises, when the main character describes what he sees when arriving in a village called Burguete, three planes are depicted: the village, the forest, and the hill, and they are all are cut across by the diagonal line of the road. We are reminded here of Cézanne’s many versions of the Mont Sainte Victoire or The Bend in the Road (La Route Tournante): in most of these images, the road which cuts through the landscape, usually from foreground to background, represents an angular line which delineates different planes which, through the difference which is thus created between them, give depth to the whole picture. But whether Hemingway dealt with his character’s immediate surroundings or a panoramic vision, he, like Cézanne, focused not so much on the realism of the landscape itself, but on the realism of the sensation felt both by the reader and the artist. In his book on Cézanne entitled The World of Cézanne: 1839—1906, Richard Murphy explains that Cézanne “shifted the emphasis in painting from the things viewed to the consciousness of the viewer.”23 And it seems that Hemingway used some of Cézanne’s pictorial techniques to achieve the same effect. In both Cézanne’s paintings and Hemingway’s texts, the viewer and reader are made to enter the scene. Firstly, the audience’s gaze is channeled, as both artists sometimes set obvious limits to their works through restricting the audience’s view. Part of their art is to include and show the usually implied boundaries within which their subjects are framed. The limits are concretely represented on the canvas or in the text. For instance, in the short story “Indian Camp” Hemingway framed his central action through the repetition of the same scene at the beginning and end of the narration. In the same way, in a work entitled The Farmyard (1879), which Hemingway saw at the Luxembourg Museum, Cézanne framed his central subject by painting, on each side of the picture, two massive walls.

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Then, Hemingway, like Cézanne, invites the reader to re-enact an actual space experience. They often do not add realistic details that would slow down the description, but focus on dimensions in the landscape which the reader can know in his or her own experience of space. The reader is thus made to duplicate and even sometimes bypass the protagonist’s perspective: s/he may indeed have the feeling of experiencing the scene through or even with the main character, but also on her or his own. A famous example is the landscape description with which A Farewell to Arms opens and in which the point of view seems to be impersonal, allowing the reader to easily identify with it and almost forget about the character who remains the focalizer of the narration. But this malleable impersonality imposed upon some characters, and the consequent identification of the viewer/reader with it under the guise of an apparent subjectivity, is nevertheless limited by and has to take into account the fact that both Cézanne and Hemingway claimed that their works represented both a subject matter and their own perception of it. Cézanne famously said that “To paint is to record the sensation of color.”24 He did not paint in the open air. In the same way, Hemingway asserted: “A writer, if he is any good, does not describe. He invents, or makes out of knowledge personal and impersonal.”25 In the same interview, he added: “If you describe someone, it is flat, as a photograph is, and from my standpoint a failure. If you make him up from what you know, there should be all the dimensions.”26 The so-called “third dimension” of Cézanne’s painting and Hemingway’s writing was not, paradoxically, conveyed by the works’ objective character, but instead by their more humbly, and more realistically avowed, subjectivity. Representation, they both held, could not erase the traces of the artist’s perception which begot it in the first place. At the same time, to be truly achieved, this third dimension needed to be double and duplicated on the other side of the page/canvas: the raison d’être of the artist’s point of view, rooted in subjectivity, was to be reproduced within the viewer/ reader. Thus Hemingway admitted to George Plimpton: “I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened”.27 The French and American artists’ works did not aim at objectivity, but at subjectivity; their goal was not a universalized, standardized point of view, but sharing a new way of seeing, a new interpretation of reality. Reproducing the depth feeling experienced when seeing a landscape thus often meant, for Cézanne and for Hemingway, simplifying the reality of the landscape in order to create obvious tensions that will convey the

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artist’s own perception and to which the viewer/reader will inevitably react. For instance, in The Bay of Marseilles, Seen from L’Estaque, Cézanne altered the near and far, exaggerating the depth illusion. In the same way, in The Farmyard, as the critic Meyly Hagemann convincingly showed, he used spatial planes to create intense spatial tensions and a sense of enclosure. Following Cézanne, Hemingway also simplified landscapes and thus placed the stress on relationships between volumes to exaggerate the sensation of enclosure. Moving beyond simplification, Cézanne and Hemingway found in abstraction a way of both transcribing sensation and seizing reality at its core.

Abstraction: The Fine Line between Reducing Reality to its Most Important Elements and Conceptualizing it through Abstractions As the critic Richard W. Murphy in The World of Cézanne 1839—1906 notes: The completed picture, therefore, would not look precisely like the scene before Cézanne’s eyes, but it would contain the essential components of that scene and this is the secret of the landscapes that so remarkably catch the essence of Cézanne’s country while eliminating most of its details.28

“The essential components” Murphy refers to constitute a kind of microcosm that recurrently appears in Hemingway’s stories and novels and Cézanne’s paintings during the last twenty years of his life: namely, hills, woods, rocks and fields. As Simon Schama notes in his book Landscape and Memory, the essentials of landscape are: woods, water, rock, and forest. In Hemingway’s writings, the depiction of trees, rocks and roadways are motifs that derive from the visual art. Rather than being described, they are more often mentioned together. For instance, in “Hills like White Elephants” (1927), hills, a river, mountains and a track are mentioned. In “Alpine Idyll” (1927), a white road, trees, a field and a stream make up the landscape. More and more Cézanne came to represent reality through the use of geometrical shapes that embodied both an essential reality and the limits of representation. He structurally ordered whatever he perceived into an interaction of planes and simple forms. Hemingway did exaggerate in his writings a tension between two spatial planes as, for instance, in the scene describing Jake’s arriving in Pamplona in The Sun Also Rises in which Hemingway balances a series of verticals against the horizon. The

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horizontality of the plain is opposed to the verticality of the town of Pamplona. As in Cézanne’s paintings, these tensions and forms in the landscape bring structure and solidity to the description and the perception of depth. But Hemingway’s descriptions never reached the level of abstraction Cézanne advocated in his paintings. In 1904, in a letter to Emile Bernard, Cézanne wrote: May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed toward a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth … lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface ….29

As we have just seen, Hemingway did use “lines parallel to the horizon” and “lines perpendicular to this horizon”. He was also undeniably sensitive to the effects of geometrical forms in the works of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi who, like Cézanne, abstracted human and other forms to geometrical shapes without losing the actual representational quality of the figure; and he truly admired the painting by Brueghel entitled The Harvesters, about which he said: “It’s a great one, of the harvesters. It is a lot of people cutting grain, but he uses the grain geometrically, to make an emotion that is so strong for me that I can hardly take it.”30 He did describe the Rocky Mountains as “that peak that looked so smooth and geometrical”.31 And a few examples may be found which demonstrate the writer’s interest in the volume and solidity of an object. In “Big TwoHearted River”, the area near the river is described as “sometimes from the top of a rise a great solid island of pines”;32 in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, a passage depicts “the solid bamboo slopes, and the heavy rain forest again, sculptured into peaks and hollows until they crossed…”33 But these examples are too few to allow us to say that Hemingway sought to “recreate” nature by simplifying forms to their basic geometric equivalents. So Hemingway did not follow Cézanne on the path of abstraction. The writer stopped one step before abstraction with the representation of recurring motifs undeniably inspired by Cézanne, but whose receding importance in Hemingway’s work may be interpreted as the declining influence of the French painter on the American writer’s later work.

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The Motif as the “Stabilized” Form of a Landscape between Realism and Symbolism Beyond the perception and interpretation, in Hemingway’s and Cézanne’s works, the landscape is made to stand for something else than itself: it may be made into a symbol. In the opening paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, the road and the river are opposed in their symbolism: the former, covered with dry dust, stands for death, while the latter is the archetypal image of life. But the striking element of the landscape which keeps on recurring in the two artists’ works, and which thus becomes a central motif of their art, is the mountain. In Hemingway’s works such as “Big Two-Hearted River” and A Farewell to Arms, the mountain is seen as a refuge, it is synonymous with happiness, with youth’s carelessness. And when the characters have to leave it, it is to find death in the plain, or a grown-up man’s duties (see, for instance, the short stories “Cross Country Snow” and “An Alpine Idyll”, both dated 1925). One may even wonder, after reading “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), to what extent the mountain does not stand for a kind of heaven: the main character, who dies in the plain, dreams before dying that a plane takes him to the summit of the mountain. And right under the title of the short story, Hemingway briefly reminds us of the meaning of Kilimanjaro: “the House of God”. In the same way, the Mont Sainte-Victoire Cézanne depicted so many times in the last years of his life, seems to have conveyed some kind of spiritual message for the painter. Mont Sainte-Victoire for Cézanne, and the mountains of Switzerland, of Africa, or the hills of Spain for Hemingway, seem to embody an element of eternity in midst of man’s relativity and transitoriness, a permanence unrelated to man.34 One may here be reminded of the prefatory quotation from Ecclesiastes to The Sun Also Rises: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever … The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose …” Neither Hemingway nor Cézanne often depicted people as part of their landscapes. In the mountain, time seems to have stopped. It may not be by chance that Cézanne started painting portraits, then still lifes, finishing with Mont Sainte-Victoire. The motif of the mountain in these two artists’ work could well be seen as another “White Whale”, another Moby Dick which would embody the other, the unconscious, the non-human. For both it may embody the immortality which, Hemingway admitted to George Plimpton, he was trying to reach through his work: “you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than

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anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.”35 But Hemingway never tried to describe the mountain as Cézanne obsessively did at the end of his career. It is most of the time seen from a distance. The motif of the mountain does seem to embody in his work the iceberg which, in his literary theory, symbolized all that should not and sometimes cannot be expressed in his stories and novels. The fact that this motif literally recedes in the background of Hemingway’s work may also show how Cézanne’s influence upon him gradually decreased. Instead, it was another of Cézanne’s motifs which became more and more important in Hemingway’s works: the road. Hemingway’s short stories and novels are crisscrossed by paths, trails, as well as railroad tracks, rivers, or streams. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1952), the mountain around which the story literally revolves is never described, while the road is: “they walked up the sleigh-smoothed, urine-yellowed road along the river.”36 As in many of Cézanne’s paintings like his paintings already mentioned and entitled La Route Tournante (The Bend in the Road), Hemingway’s roads are often curved and symbolic of an access to knowledge being denied to the characters. I would argue that through the motifs of the mountains and the road Hemingway symbolically—and maybe unconsciously—re-enacted the act of writing. In Hemingway’s landscapes, the path of writing keeps on trying to penetrate the secret knowledge the mountain stands for, just as the lines of the text slip on the page. Writing is one with the road. In the Black Forest, after the war, we rented a trout stream and there were two ways to walk to it. One was down the valley from Triberg and around the valley road in the shades of the trees that bordered the white road, and then up a side road that went up through the hills past many small farms, with the big Schwarzwald houses, until that road crossed the stream. That was where our fishing began.37

In this quotation from “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the repetition of the word “road” shows how the writing literally sticks to it. The changes associated to each repetition also accentuate, concretely embody, the passage of time, a passage which the road, and even more strikingly the stream, represent. Through the motif of the road, Hemingway’s landscape is thus spread in time, while Cézanne tried to seize and record the immutability of the mountain or freeze one single instant in time.

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Conclusion Obviously, the common features which exist in the two artists’ works can be easily seen, and these analogies may in their turn fruitfully shed light on each artist separately, and on the influence the French painter had on the American writer. Making a distinction between common aspects and direct influence is indeed a tricky issue for the literary and art critics. What is clear in the end is the point at which their paths diverged. Hemingway ends up expressing the temporal value of writing through the spatial art of painting. By contrast, and yet symmetrically, Cézanne’s obsessive representation of the Mont Sainte Victoire38 makes of this motif a kind of sign that ends up representing above all its own successive distortions. Instead of seizing eternity or—at the other extreme—one instant, it records nothing but its own evolution and becomes consequently an embodiment of the passage of time. While the French painter became obsessed with the sign and its representation only, the American writer always attached as much importance to the sign as to what it represented.

Bibliography Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1969. Berman, Ron. “Recurrence in Hemingway and Cézanne.” The Hemingway Review 23, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 21-36. —. “Hemingway’s Michigan Landscapes.” The Hemingway Review 27, no. 1 (September 2007): 39-54. Clark, Kenneth. Landscape into Art. London: John Murray Publishers, 1949. Doran, Michael, Shiff, Richard, and Cochran, Julie Lawrence. Conversations with Cézanne. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” In Criticism: The Foundation of Modern Literary Judgement, edited by Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles and Gordon McKenzie, 89-100. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948. Fry, Roger. Cézanne: A Study of His Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Gaillard, Theodore L.. “Hemingway’s Debt to Cézanne: New Perspectives.” Twentieth Century Literature 45 (Spring 1999): 65-74. Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Hemingway’s Craft. Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973.

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Hagemann, Meyly Chin. “Hemingway’s Secret: Visual to Verbal Art.” Journal of Modern Literature 7, no. 1 (February 1979): 87-112. Hemingway, Ernest. The Short Stories: The First Forty-Nine Stories. 1938. New York: Scribner, 1995. —. A Moveable Feast. 1964. London: Arrow Books, 1996. —. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. London: Arrow Books, 1993. —. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. London: Arrow Books, 1993. Hermann, Thomas. “Formal Analogies in the Texts and Paintings of Ernest Hemingway and Paul Cézanne.” In Hemingway Repossessed, edited by Kenneth Rosen, 29-33. Westport: Praeger, 1994. Hoog, Michel. L’Univers de Cézanne. Paris : H. Scrépel, 1971. —. Cézanne, Puissant et Solitaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. —. Cézanne: The First Modern Painter. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Johnston, Kenneth. “Hemingway and Cézanne: Doing the Country.” American Literature 56 (March 1984): 28-37. Jones, Edward T. “Hemingway and Cézanne: A Speculative Affinity.” Unisa English Studies: Journal of the Department of English 8, no, 2 (1970): 26-28. Kazin, Alfred. “Hemingway the Painter.” The New Republic, 17 March, 1977. Lair, Robert L. “Hemingway and Cézanne: An Indebtness. ” Modern Fiction Studies 6, no. 2 (Summer 1960): 165-68. Louvel, Liliane. L’Oeil du Texte : Texte et Image dans la Littérature de Langue Anglaise. Toulouse : Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1998. —. Texte, Image : Images à Lire, Textes à Voir. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002. Machotka, Pavel. Cézanne: Landscape into Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Nelson, Raymond S. Hemingway: Expressionist Artist. Ames: Iowa State UniversityPress, 1979. Plimpton, George. “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway”. In Hemingway and His Critics, edited by Carlos Baker, 19-37. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Ross, Lilian. “How Do You Like It Now Gentlemen?” In Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robert P Weeks, 17-39. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Random House, 1994. Schnitzer, Deborah. The Pictorial in Modernist Fiction from Stephen Crane to Ernest Hemingway. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988.

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Schwarz, Daniel R. Reconfiguring Modernism: Exploration in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997. Shapiro, Meyer. Romanesque Art; Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. London: Chatto and Windus, 1977-78. Watts, Emily. Ernest Hemingway and the Arts. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971.

Notes 1

Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (London: Methuen, 1950). Quoted in Emily Watts, Ernest Hemingway and the Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 3. 2 William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions Pub., 1951), 264. Quoted in Watts, Hemingway and the Arts, 16. 3 Alfred Kazin, “Hemingway the Painter”, The New Republic, March 17 1977, 24. 4 Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 (New York: Scribner, 1981), 122. 5 Thomas Hermann, “Formal Analogies in the Texts and Paintings of Ernest Hemingway and Paul Cézanne,” in Hemingway Repossessed, ed. Kenneth Rosen (Westport: Praeger, 1994), 29. 6 Lilian Ross, “How Do You Like It Now Gentlemen?” in Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert P. Weeks (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1962), 19. Originally published in The New Yorker, May 13, 1950. 7 George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway,” in Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthology, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 27-28. 8 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964; London: Arrow Books, 1996), 13. 9 Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway”, 29. 10 Watts, Hemingway and the Arts, 27. 11 Ibid., xiii. 12 Meyly Chin Hagemann, “Hemingway’s Secret: Visual to Verbal Art”, Journal of Modern Literature 7, no. 1 (February 1979): 89. 13 Michael Doran, Richard Shiff, and Julie Lawrence Cochran, Conversations with Cézanne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 110. 14 Kenneth Johnston, “Hemingway and Cézanne: Doing the Country”, American Literature 56 (March 1984): 31. 15 Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway”, 34, emphasis mine. 16 Hemingway, Moveable Feast, 64. 17 In a letter to Edward J O’Brien dated September 12, 1924, Hemingway wrote: “What I’ve been doing is trying to do country so you don’t remember the words after you read it but actually have the Country. It is hard because to do it you have

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to see the country all complete all the time you write and not just have a romantic feeling about it”. Quoted in Baker, Hemingway and His Critics, 123. 18 Ibid., 128. 19 Roger Fry, Cézanne: A Study of His Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 13. 20 Johnston, “Hemingway and Cézanne”, 33. 21 Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”, in The Short Stories, The First Forty-Nine Stories (1938; New York: Scribner, 1995), 211. 22 Ibid., 211. 23 Richard Murphy, The World of Cézanne 1839-1906 (New York: Time-Life, 1968), 77. Quoted in Deborah Schnitzer, The Pictorial in Modernist Fiction from Stephen Crane to Ernest Hemingway (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 120. 24 Washington National Gallery of Art, “Cézanne in Provence”, at http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/cezanne/motif9.shtm: emphasis mine. 25 Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway”, 35. 26 Ibid., 33. 27 Ibid., 34. 28 Johnston, “Hemingway and Cézanne”, 30. 29 Fry, Cézanne, 52. 30 Ross, “How Do You Like It Now Gentlemen?”, 36, emphasis mine. 31 Watts, Hemingway and the Arts, 36. 32 Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River”, 212. 33 Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, in The Short Stories, The First Forty-Nine Stories (New York: Scribner, 1995), 76. 34 According to one of his friends, Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne allegedly told him: “Everything we see is fleeting, isn’t it? Nature is always the same, but nothing about her that we see endures. Our art must convey a glimmer of her endurance with the elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us the sense of her eternity.” Quoted in Doran, Shiff, and Cochran Conversations, 110. 35 Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway”, 37. 36 Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, 56, emphasis mine. 37 Ibid., 68, emphasis mine. 38 He supposedly painted over 60 versions of the mountain.

CHAPTER ELEVEN HUGO AND DICKENS: A VIEW OF THE CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF THE BODY AND PUNISHMENT IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND, C. 1789-1859 ZINEB BOUIZEM

“Punishment’ is what revenge calls itself.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The main focus of this chapter will be the changing conceptions of the body and punishment in France and England in the period c. 1789-1859, a period which saw major changes in the perception of both the criminal and his punishment. We will concentrate on two of the most popular novelists of nineteenth-century France and England: Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. In their novels, respectively Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné (1829),1 and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), both novelists express their involvement with these issues, with a particular attention to the way in which changing conceptions of punishment correlate with a new representation of the body. The nineteenth century was a fundamental period of transition from a system based on corporal punishments in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, to new and, as they were known, “gentler” modes of punishment which gradually came to supplant those rituals of either humiliating, mutilating, or butchering to death (for the most serious crimes) the bodies of those who broke the law. In circumstances such as these, Dickens and Hugo used their reputations to argue in favour of penal reform, particularly as far as physical punishments were concerned. But even when the use of physical punishment was limited, prison also became a controversial substitute to execution, torture, and transportation. Such an institution necessarily meant less bloodstained pages in the history of the West, but the shift was not equated with an evolution from cruel and painful to harmless and

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humane sentences, so Dickens and Hugo were also very critical of prisons. Therefore, it was the very conception of punishment which was at stake and, in Le Dernier Jour and A Tale of Two Cities, both authors transcribe the conflicting visions of their times, not simply concerning the necessity to end physical punishments, but also on the need to find the most appropriate prison regime. The debates which took place in the period between the French Revolution to the second half of the nineteenth century reveal the great intricacy of the question of punishment, especially as so many countries were involved with the issue—France, Great Britain, Italy, America, for example. Here, the focus will be on France and England, in an attempt to show how Dickens and Hugo reflected the gradual recognition of the inefficiency, and even the danger of employing physical punishments, in a West which was subject to major changes, and which defined itself through progress and the values of the Enlightenment.

Dickens and Hugo on the Death Penalty A significant area of common ground between Dickens and Hugo is their concern for the death penalty, the most extreme and irrevocable form of punishment.2 The death penalty was a topical subject in the 1830s, and figures such as Alphonse de Lamartine and Charles Lucas, a young lawyer and philanthropist, actively campaigned for its abolition.3 Dickens and Hugo were also strong advocates of reform and Hugo was very explicit in his intentions, as he explained early on in the 1832 preface: “Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné n’est autre chose qu’un plaidoyer, direct ou indirect, comme on voudra, pour l’abolition de la peine de mort”.4 This defence of the abolition of capital punishment was based on a number of arguments also employed by Dickens. Hugo further explained that “se laver les mains est bien, empêcher le sang de couler serait mieux”.5 For him, declaring himself opposed to capital punishment was not enough; his view was that it was also his duty to argue in favour of, and make every possible effort towards, its abolition. This is precisely what Dickens did between 1845 and 1849, when he wrote a series of letters to the editors of the Edinburgh Review, The Daily News and The Times exposing the ill-effects of capital punishment, and strongly recommending reform. He warned especially against the “morbid”, “horrible”, “strange”, “inexplicable” fascination, “the depraved excitement” public executions arouse.6 Dickens himself attended an execution in Rome, which shows how ambivalent his views on punishment were, no matter how vehement his condemnations were. But this also revealed the validity of his main argument against capital

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punishment: public executions must be ended as they fascinate and attract even the most respectable portion of the population.7 In Le Dernier Jour, when the prison functionaries “ferre les forçats”8 who are to leave on the following day for the bagne of Toulon, a wellknown convict prison for hard labour in southern France, the whole prison of Bicêtre is joyfully celebrating the event, and the condemned man is invited to join the party of spectators. He then admits: “C’était en effet, pour un reclus solitaire, une bonne fortune qu’un spectacle, si odieux qu’il fût. J’acceptai l’amusement”.9 But while the view of this spectacle, this “chose hideuse” 10 as he calls it, is terrible to him, as he realises that “de ce châtiment horrible [le crime] faisait une fête de famille”:11 the other prisoners were actually greeting the convicts with cheers and applause. This is the reality that Hugo’s condemned man and Charles Darnay in A Tale of Two Cities are confronted with: they become aware that their execution is expected as a public event, a spectacle the crowd will enjoy. Six hours before the time of his execution, the condemned man reflects upon this buzzing world which is premeditating his death: Ce bruit sourd de cris que j’entends au-dehors, ce flot de peuple joyeux qui déjà se hâte sur les quais, ces gendarmes qui s’apprêtent dans leurs casernes, ce prêtre en robe noire, cet autre homme aux mains rouges, c’est pour moi !12

Later on, he recollects a day when, as he was driving by La Place de Grève, the notorious execution square in Paris, he saw a crowd which had flocked there to look at an execution. Men, women, even children, all of them were the spectators of a scene which becomes another “crime.”13 The mob joyfully gathering for his own death is described as a bloodthirsty pack of wild animals: “l’horrible foule buveuse de sang”,14 “l’horrible peuple qui aboie, et m’attend, et rit”15 “les mille têtes hurlantes du peuple entassées pêle-mêle”.16 The description of this scene is imbued with a sense of madness and cannibalism that is accentuated by the presence of “des marchands de sang humain”17 who make money, blood money, out of this spectacle by selling either seats or the “arrêts de mort,” the public announcements of executions. Charles Darnay finds himself in the same case when he is arrested on charge of treason and sentenced by the vengeful Revolutionary tribunal to being guillotined.18 Other characters, such as Gabelle, the postmaster and tax collector, old Foulon, a notorious figure remembered for having said to the “famished people that they might eat grass”,19 and also obviously the Marquis St Evrémonde, Charles Darnay’s uncle—all of them and many others are also murdered

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by the revolutionaries. The guillotine itself is the subject of jokes among the patriots: It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close ….20

In his preface, Hugo also adopts an ironical tone as he concedes that “[c]hose étrange! la guillotine elle-même est un progrès. /M. Guillotin était un philanthrope”.21 Through their irony, both novelists lay heavy stress on the cruelty of this type of execution by decapitation and, in his preface, Hugo even gives gory examples of cases of failed executions.22 The very name of this device of death sounds horrible to their ears; “le nom de la chose est effroyable” explains the condemned man. 23 He goes on mentally dismantling at the same time the machine and the word itself: La combinaison de ces dix lettres, leur aspect, leur physiognomie est bien faite pour éveiller une idée épouvantable, et le médecin de malheur qui a inventé la chose avait un nom prédestiné. L’image que j’y attache, à ce mot hideux, est vague, indéterminée, et d’autant plus sinistre. Chaque syllabe est comme une pièce de la machine. J’en construis et j’en démolis sans cesse dans mon esprit la monstrueuse charpente.”24

It is an ugly, sinister, deadly device and symbolically the act of fragmenting the word into syllables which become like spare parts of the mechanism itself can be paralleled with the destruction of the guillotine, and therefore with the abolition of capital punishment. The text is therefore a tool that Hugo uses to represent (literarily) the mental realisation of his desire to see capital punishment abolished. Dickens’s and Hugo’s criticism is further strengthened by the fact that innocents might be killed, and because this is an irrevocable sentence, the harm caused will never be undone.25 There are several types of “innocents”, however. As he is drawn back to his patrie in order to come to Gabelle’s help after he has been imprisoned by the revolutionaries,26 Charles Darnay is stopped by a group of armed citizen-patriots who escort him to Paris, where they let him know that he will be judged by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Being considered as an emigrant aristocrat27 and an enemy to the newly-born Republic, he is sentenced to death. But there is a dramatic double injustice, as Sydney Carton sacrifices his life to save Darnay. His sense of self-worthlessness leads him to self-destruction and in spite of the positive image of resurrection,28 Dickens’s criticism is

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directed at society and its responsibility in providing education and sound conditions of living to the poorest part of the population, often called the residuum of society.29 Accordingly, there are those who have actually committed a crime, but who are still perceived as victims. They fall into two categories: on the one hand, there is Hugo’s condemned man who is himself horrified by his deed as the reminiscences of his blissful childhood abound in his mind,30 and as he movingly says farewell to his daughter who does not even recognise him. He reflects woefully on this situation, declaring “misérables lois et misérables hommes, je n’étais pas un méchant!”.31 But this system allows no second chance. On the other hand, there are those who fall in criminality as a result of misery and neglect, like the friauche (which means a condemned man in the French slang of the period). The condemned man meets him at the Palais de Justice32 and in his case, the sense of redemption is replaced by the necessity to survive in a hostile world. He tells the story of his life, and concludes by explaining that “je me mis à tuer pour vivre”.33 As we can see, in all of those cases the root-cause pointed out by Dickens and Hugo is social injustice and the absence of any humanity in the judicial proceedings. The condemned men are even colloquially called game, “du gibier”.34

The Barbarism of Physical Punishments and the New Relationship to the Body As we have seen, Dickens and Hugo were very critical of the death penalty,35 and it becomes metaphorically a social disease as the condemned man explains: “j’ai une maladie, une maladie mortelle, une maladie faite de la main des hommes”.36 But their criticism was extended to the various types of corporal punishments employed up to the eighteenth century, these barbarous punishments were listed by Hugo in 1832 as he ironically advised penologists to reintroduce them: alors rendez-nous le seizième siècle, soyez vraiment formidables, rendeznous la variété des supplices ... rendez-nous le gibet, la roue, le bûcher, l’estrapade, l’essorillement, l’écartèlement, la fosse à enfouir vif, la cuve à bouillir vif.37

He went on to explain that “[a]u fond de ce doucereux verbiage, vous ne trouverez que dureté de coeur, cruauté, barbarie … Sous la patte de velours du juge on sent les ongles du bourreau”.38 There was no real interest in the social background and personal history of the offender; the harshness of judges are the butt of both Hugo’s and Dickens’s satire, as their legal decisions do not give way to any form of rehabilitation, to a real

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change (a “reform”) in the offender. As we have seen, the locale of punishment, meaning the place where it is carried out, was a public, most often urban, space—either La Place de Grève in Paris, or the Old Bailey in London, for instance. At this period, executions, but also scenes of torture, were therefore public events. This violence, these passions, this lack of respect for the dignity of human life found an uncontrollable, extreme form of expression in A Tale of Two Cities as Dickens set his story during the French Revolution.39 The timeline becomes blurred, thanks to the use of flashbacks within the period running from 1757 (when Doctor Manette of Beauvais is imprisoned by the Evrémonde brothers) to 1793 (when the final events of the story occur and the heroes are eventually saved). The series of historical events were thus imbued with a more general, even universal dimension, which meant that Dickens’s arguments against physical and capital punishments were also significant in his own period. Furthermore, the link between France and England is made as early as the opening chapter, entitled “The Period”: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity … There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.40

These often-quoted opening lines clearly show that there were, in many respects, common points between the two countries in this period of history. In the passage comparing the royal figureheads of both countries, the parallel construction of the sentence points to these similarities between France and England, as they were faced with the same problem: social injustice (Dickens’s criticism being transposed to the Victorian period) and the greed of the rulers (the “jaw” being a synecdoche of the mouth, and the large mouth itself a symbol for the aristocrats’ greed for power and money). Even if England did not have her own revolution, the tremendous impact of the French Revolution on the country is undeniable. A Tale of Two Cities is not the story of a criminal who is physically punished for his crime. Yet, on a symbolical level, the whole novel revolves around the themes of vengeance and punishment, punishment meaning, in its most primitive form, the act of inflicting bodily pain. Nietzsche argues that the underlying desire fulfilled through punishment is revenge;41 certainly, as the revolutionaries call for justice, they also take their revenge. The massive upheaval of the French population against the

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oppression of the aristocrats of the ancien régime, without being vindicated by Dickens or Hugo, is yet justified by the fact that such a degree of tyranny and injustice was bound to produce the outburst of violence which is the Revolution. The indifference of the protagonists of Hugo’s A Comedy about a Tragedy (a short play in one act which preceded the publication of the third edition of Le Dernier Jour), for instance the Fat Gentleman (a name recalling the opulence of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie) or the Philosopher, is all the more shocking as they blame the author of Le Dernier Jour for telling them about this reality they prefer to ignore. In A Tale of Two Cities, the executioner is not a representative member of the state; it is a reversed justice, as it is now the French population which has taken up arms and which inflicts punishment on those whose crimes are no longer to be endured. So, in this context, the extreme violence of the revolutionaries (for example, during the storming of the Bastille in 1789, or when hundreds of prisoners were savagely murdered during the Terreur, in September 1792) is a magnified version of the harsh corporal punishments of the ancien régime. Both Dickens and Hugo mention the actual case of François Robert Damiens who attempted to kill King Louis XV on 5 January 1757 (incidentally, the very year when Doctor Manette was put in jail).42 Damiens’s tortures on La Place de Grève caused a scandal because of the extreme barbarism of this “supplice.” The opening chapter of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), entitled “Le corps des condamnés” (“The Bodies of the Condemned”), is also dedicated to this case (the length of this description, which is takes over three full pages, is in itself very revealing). In Le Dernier Jour and A Tale of Two Cities, the authors denounce the wanton cruelty of punishment, and to a similar extent, in A Tale, this is mirrored in the undisciplined conduct of the revolutionary mob which is compared to a natural force or element—it is like a forest, an ocean, a fire, a storm, it is as if nothing could stop the inevitable course of events. The comment of the narrator, “so resistless was the force of the ocean,”43 also implies that change in the penal system was absolutely vital. The novel seems to be ruled by an as-you-sow-you-shall-reap principle, for characters such as Jacques, Madame Defarge, or Vengeance take the law into their hands and punish those who are against the Republic and its principles of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. The mob, therefore, constitutes one sadistic executioner who wants his victims to feel their punishment. Nietzsche’s theory of the “will to power” seems to perfectly define this “character” that the mob constitutes, but it is in essence unruly, excessive, overpowering and destructive. This executioner has lost his humanity and is transformed

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into a beast, a savage, a devil: “there was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no measurement of time”.44 Through this episode of French history Dickens was able to pinpoint the brutish, inhumane nature of physical punishments, but as a new conception of the human body was developing throughout the nineteenth century, changes could gradually be introduced. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that “[l]’execution publique est perçue maintenant comme un foyer où la violence se rallume.”45 This is precisely what happens in A Tale of Two Cities, and this violence converges on bodies, which are exhibited and destroyed. Heads are chopped off and brandished on pikes; bodies are reduced to pieces, dislocated, trampled.46 When the inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint Antoine discover that old Foulon is not dead as they thought him to be, they decide to find and kill him. They scream in the streets, “Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from him.” Every single part of the body (including the soul) is claimed. Wishing that “grass may grow from him” is obviously a form of revenge,47 but clearly the underlying desire that must be satisfied here is cannibalism.48 What is more, the secret profession of Jerry Cruncher, ironically nicknamed the “honest tradesman,” is scavenging as he digs up buried bodies to sell their parts to surgeons. In all such cases, the relationship to the body is marked by a form of cannibalism and revolutionaries are turned into bloodthirsty, monstrous ogres. In chapter five of A Tale of Two Cities, a wine cask is accidentally broken in the Faubourg Saint Antoine and the inhabitants ghoulishly drink the wine spilled on the stoned pavement. This episode functions as a prolepsis for the bloody events of the Revolution as wine symbolises the massacres of this period. In Le Dernier Jour, also, the naked bodies of the convicts are exposed in the prison yard as the prison officials put the irons on them. But as if it were not enough, a heavy rain transforms the bodies almost into corpses: they are shivering, their limbs become frozen, bluish.49 In this case, their punishment is aggravated by humiliation which is strongly condemned by Hugo and Dickens. Their conception of punishment is mainly based on what Hugo called “l’inviolabilité de la vie humaine”;50 Dickens talked about “the sacredness of human life”.51 Any punishment, no matter the extent to which it is deserved, must respect the dignity of the individual. One of the major reasons why it was so important to introduce penal reforms is well summarised by Hugo in his preface as he uses the arguments of his opponents to contradict them in favour of the abolition of capital punishment. He writes:

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Mais, reprend-on,—il faut que la société se venge, que la société punisse. —Ni l’un, ni l’autre. Se venger est de l’individu, punir est de Dieu. La société est entre deux. Le châtiment est au-dessus d’elle, la vengeance en dessous. Rien de si grand et de si petit ne lui sied. Elle ne doit pas ‘punir pour se venger’; elle doit corriger pour améliorer.52

This conflict between the desire to “exact vengeance” and the desire to “punish” is a leading motif of both works of fiction. In this passage from Le Dernier Jour, Hugo’s claim is that neither vengeance, nor punishment are within man’s province; just like Dickens, he believed in the powers of reformation and rehabilitation. The allegorical character of Vengeance in A Tale of Two Cities symbolises this penal system marked by the belief in retribution and the desire to set examples. The usual argument was, the harsher the punishment, the greater the impact on the viewers. But this “vengeance” of the revolutionaries—and by extension the public spectacle of punishment—was so violent that those who looked at public executions in the end lost their sensitivity and own dignity; and as a consequence their passions were more easily given free reign, which could only increase the crime rate. Therefore, in an age known as the Age of Reason, and under the influences of the philosophies of the Enlightenment, it became more and more urgent to reform the penal system and reconsider the very idea of punishment and its ethics. It was obvious that, in doing so, reformers would primarily need to civilise the people, getting them used to a less violent, a more “civil” way of life.53 But besides this, at the same time that penal reforms were introduced, the means of discipline and control were reinforced. Putting an end to life was not an adequate solution anymore; now the system formed what Foucault called “les corps dociles” (“docile bodies”)54 and it was obvious that the conceptions of the body and punishment had greatly changed throughout the century. As we have seen, the French Revolution was a turning point in this evolution and this period is often considered as the birth of the penal prison, a punishment which was gradually generalised throughout the century. Article Four of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen reads: “Liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not injure another; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.” In France and England, the nineteenth century was a period when prison, meaning the deprivation of liberty, was beginning to be viewed as a more appropriate sentence for individuals who misused their own rights and particularly their freedom.

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The aim here is not to consider the whole range of issues raised by the debates on imprisonment, as this would require much more space than I have to analyse each of them thoroughly and the extent to which both novelists accepted or rejected the prison theories formulated in their times. Two of the most problematic facets of the debate will be studied here: firstly, the problems posed by the great complexity of the issue, partly due to its international scope, and secondly, the confrontation of the two conceptualisations of the nature of the criminal which were developed in the mid-Victorian period. One conceptualisation was informed by the view that criminals can be assimilated to savages, or madmen, implying that they are creatures who cannot be brought back to reason or normality; the other was a less fatalistic one, which stressed the influence of the environment in developing criminal impulses. This dichotomy in the perception of the criminal class is reflected in Le Dernier Jour and A Tale of Two Cities, as Hugo and Dickens explored both visions, but their characters also reflect the whole complexity of the question, as either of the two conceptions required major changes in the penal landscape.

An Intricate and Embarrassing Debate The debate on imprisonment started already in the late eighteenth century, with reformers, such as John Howard (1726-1790), but it soon became apparent that finding alternatives to corporal punishments was not an easy enterprise. Both English and French authorities had recourse to transportation: convicts were sent to the “penal colonies,” like the bagne de Cayenne, in French Guinea; or, for the English convicts, America or Botany Bay in Australia. But soon transportation began to be perceived as a failure of a penal system which could not deal with its outcasts at home. Besides this, many reformers were inspired by the principles of Utilitarianism, developed by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) in the late eighteenth century.55 Bentham argued that societies should be guided by one essential rule: “the greatest happiness to the greatest number.” According to his theory of pain and pleasure, also called the theory of utility, convicts should not be transported away since these men constituted a necessary workforce for the nation.56 Thus, according to this principle, transportation was a waste. The activity of Alexandre Manette, the shoemaker of the Bastille, was a psychological lifebelt for a captive who was imprisoned “in secret” for eighteen years, but it also highlights the importance of labour in Victorian society and the desire to keep prisoners active rather than idle.

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Prison is a central concern in Le Dernier Jour and A Tale of Two Cities. Throughout the nineteenth century, it gradually replaced corporal punishments and transportation, but it was not without difficulty that this new system was introduced, because it constantly needed to be reformed and improved. Another issue was the fact that the debate extended beyond the frontiers of France and England. Many other countries expressed the same interest in imprisonment from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century. In his preface, Hugo explained that he was satisfied to contribute to the promotion of the principles introduced in 1764 by Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), one of the major penal figures of the eighteenth century. In Dei Delitti e Delle Pene, his treatise on crimes and punishments, the main argument is that “in order to be effective [punishment] must be accompanied by mild legislation.”57 This is precisely the idea Hugo develops in Le Dernier Jour. Dickens was also aware of the international dimension of the problem. In 1896, Alfred Trumble commented that Dickens “went jail hunting whenever opportunity offered,”58 and he was actually known for his “prison tourism” so to speak, either at home, or abroad. Penal institutions which he visited included: Newgate (1836); Philadelphia’s Eastern Penitentiary (1842); prisons in Pittsburgh (1842); Lausanne (1846);59 New York (the State Prison at Sing Sing); and prisons in Rome.60 Prison was an obsession for him and even his dwelling-place in Genoa, where he spent a year in the mid-eighteen-forties—the Villa Bagnerello—was nicknamed the “Pink Jail” (“a far more expressive name for the mansion,”61 as he described it in chapter four of Pictures from Italy, published in 1846). In spite of the deep interest Dickens and Hugo had for prison, the difficulty of finding the “best” system—if there can be a “perfect” prison type—was also due to the different conceptions of the criminal expressed in the nineteenth century, which obviously had an impact on the way reformers perceived any penal changes.

Punishment and the Nature of the Criminal Nineteenth-century penal thought was influenced by a dual conception of the criminal, and as a consequence, what ensued was not one “model” but several of prisons which corresponded to one or the other of these theories of the criminal mind. In an article entitled “Between the Madman and the Savage: Scientific Theories on the Criminal, 1850-1914,” Neil Davie studies the impact of Darwinism and scientific criminology in the creation of these conceptions of the “criminal class.”62 This study is particularly focused on the works of Henry Mayhew, in London Labour

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and the London Poor (1851-62); and of Cesare Lombroso, in L’Uomo Delinquente (The Criminal Man, 1876). Davie explains that both Mayhew and Lombroso built their theories on a new reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species, as they transposed the principle of natural selection to man. This resulted in a new understanding of criminality that focused on “criminal identities”;63 but more importantly, as industrialisation and urbanisation radically transformed society, the working class emerged as a threatening group, soon viewed as the “dangerous class.” This class was also divided into two categories: there were the honest, hard-working people, and a more nomadic and depraved population which included beggars, vagrants, and prostitutes, for instance. This theory had major implications as far as punishment was concerned because the underlying assumption was that one could be born a criminal; in 1870, James Bruce Thomson used the term of “incorrigible born-devils.”64 This meant that the ideas of moral reformation, of rehabilitation, of penitence (the word “penitentiary” clearly highlights the attempt to lead the criminal to repent), were constantly in conflict with this theory of the “born-criminal,” as it was called. This concept was obviously the main argument concerning recidivists who eternally persist in their deviances, as if guided by what Nietzsche called the “eternal recurrence,” but this time the cyclical recurrent pattern is of a more genetic nature.65 Punishment, if we accept the validity of this theory, could only be partly successful—even with the best prison regime—in changing criminals’ mind. Hugo and Dickens were puzzled by this paradox: how is it possible to change a born-criminal if evil is innate in him? Is imprisonment even useful in his case? And how successful can it really be in the long run? Mayhew’s study of the “criminal class” was based on physiognomy as well as behaviour and language, which all denoted a primitive degree of evolution and a more prominent manifestation of basic instincts. Throughout the tormenting weeks he spent awaiting his execution, the condemned man meets several of such “criminal identities” and each time he notices one of these primitive features. Early on, in chapter five, we know that the other inmates of the prison of Bicêtre teach him to “rouscailler bigorne”, a slang expression meaning itself the ability to speak their peculiarly crude language.66 And gradually, throughout the chapters he finds himself almost contaminated since he uses some of their expressions, for example instead of saying “the executioner,” he says “le faucheur”, the “reaper”.67 He then comments: “Quand on entend parler cette langue, cela fait l’effet de quelque chose de sale et de poudreux, d’une liasse de haillons que l’on secouerait devant vous.”68 This meant that one could become a criminal, or at least be influenced by a criminal

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milieu.69 In chapter twenty-four, the condemned man is confronted with another condemned individual who is to be executed six weeks after the execution of our hero; and this friauche (i.e. a condemned man) takes the coat of the condemned man, arguing that he will not need it after he is dead. The condemned man, who accepts for fear of being beaten, admits: Ah bien oui, charité! j’étais plein de mauvais sentiments. J’aurais voulu pouvoir l’étrangler de mes mains, le vieux voleur! pouvoir le piler sous mes pieds ! Je me sens le coeur plein de rage et d’amertume. Je crois que la poche au fiel a crevé. La mort rend méchant.70

But death per se is not really the cause of this passionate avowal as injustice coupled with the unwholesome prison environment also contributed to this change. Here, the coat is symbolical of the “character” of the criminal: the act of giving his coat has a great import as it is emblematic of this class which constantly regenerates over time, the present generations conditioning the next, just as Fagin functions as an instructor for younger criminals in Oliver Twist. Hugo deliberately gave us a minimum of details about the crime committed by his hero as well as on his identity and background. We only know that the condemned man has murdered someone. We know nothing of the circumstances of his crime, but what we know is that he belongs to a middle- to upper-middle class (he speaks Latin, he knows how to write, he alludes to his office and job, and so forth). Therefore, he does not seem to be the born-criminal that Mayhew and Lombroso had described, which means that Hugo still believed that change was possible. This is precisely the reason why he was such a strong opponent to capital punishment, as it radically prevented any change. In A Tale of Two Cities, the narrator suggests that “all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.”71 These “wonders” seem to be defined only in the superlative mode; they correspond to the capacity to do good, or evil. The violence of Dickens’s characters is counterbalanced by the story of the lives of the poor French workers whose existences seem to have naturally led them to develop their instinct of self-preservation in the face of injustice and cruelty. Both visions are constantly in friction and prison appeared to be a place where the two perceptions of the nature of the criminal coexisted, but not without difficulties. Dickens and Hugo, even though, as we have seen, they contributed to this vision of the criminal-savage through their writings, did not reject the idea that criminals could be reformed. Their criticism, however, was that prison often stifled the possibility of any deep change in the offender. The “separate system” was probably the carceral

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system Dickens had attacked most severely in the course of his career. He discovered this system during his American tour in 1842, during a visit to the notorious Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia, also known as Cherry Hill. In this system, which was strongly supported by Evangelical Christians, prisoners were totally separated from each other in private cells, which meant that there were no visual, physical, or verbal contacts; they had to serve their sentences as “solitary prisoners”.72 Pentonville prison, opened in London in 1842, was organised according to the same model and Dickens’s article, “Pet Prisoners”, published in Household Words on 27 April, 1850, showed his resentment for this system which was based on the idea that solitude would eventually lead criminals to meditate on, and repent of their crimes.73 In Dickens and Crime, Philip Collins comments that “just about a year after Pentonville opened, one of its prisoners died and an inquest was held”.74 The arguments which Dickens advocated against it are well reflected in A Tale of Two Cities, through the character of Alexandre Manette who has been a solitary prisoner for almost eighteen years in the notorious Bastille prison. The effects of solitude and isolation had disastrous consequences on him, even with his occupation as a shoe-maker. These difficulties are analysed in chapters eighteen and nineteen of the second volume of the novel as the doctor and his friend, Mr. Lorry, discuss the impact of this maiming experience on his mental health. The amnesia caused by this experience, the “prison taint” (Pip’s expression in Great Expectations) which defined his character even when he becomes a free man, the “mental shock” as he formulates it,75 were reasons sufficient to explain why Dickens opposed the solitary system: as he saw it, solitude had no positive effects and only doubled the risks of insanity. Alone in his cell, Hugo’s condemned man reflects on his crime, his past, his future of a mere couple of hours. But what is more striking is his sense of the present and of the reality of his cell. He puts it in these words: Tout est prison autour de moi; je retrouve la prison sous toutes les formes, sous la forme humaine comme sous la forme de grille ou de verrou. Ce mur, c’est de la prison en pierre; cette porte, c’est de la prison en bois; ces guichetiers, c’est de la prison en chair et en os. La prison est une espèce d’être horrible, complet, indivisible, moitié maison, moitié homme. Je suis sa proie ...76

This stifling protean omnipresence seems to correspond to Bentham’s panopticon prison plan which he imagined in the 1780s. The architecture of his prison consisted of a circular building containing separate cells, each facing a central tower form which a secret observer could keep an eye on

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the captives, without their knowing it; which meant that they had the feeling of being always observed.77 Bentham’s theory was that architecture and surveillance combined to convey an impression of omniscience, and therefore operated directly on the criminal’s mind to change his inner nature and abnormal behaviour. But Dickens’s and Hugo’s prisoners (Charles Darnay, Doctor Manette, the condemned man, for example) are the living proofs of the danger of such a system, which could lead to schizophrenia and madness. From his prison cell in Bicêtre, and as his sense of time is increasingly blurred, the condemned man takes his lantern, one night, to literally “read” the walls of his cell: “[i]ls sont couverts d’écritures, de dessins, de figures bizarres”.78 These symbols left by prisoners are the last marks of the anguish of these men who had to bear isolation and the absence of any prospects of mental relief, of freedom, or even of life. Hugo’s choice of an interior monologue suggests this stifling “eye of power” as Bentham called it,79 but this time, we are the warders who observe the prisoner; we are forced to participate in this process. And maybe this was a means for Hugo to remind his readers that the whole body of society had to be concerned with punishment in order to carry out major, efficient, and at the same time humane penal reforms.

Conclusion Thus the involvement of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo in the major issues of their time was quite significant, but more importantly their writings in fact reflected the complexity of the debates on punishment. Unjustified cruelty in punishment was not acceptable to either of them, or many of their contemporaries in France and in England. In this sense, writing was a means of progress and change. Yet, to be effective, deep, and lasting, change had to affect not only the penal landscape, but also mentalities. The end of physical punishments and the introduction of the sentence of imprisonment did not end the problem of penal reform, though. Undeniably prison was and seemed a more humane sentence than torture for instance, as it respected the dignity of the human body, but many issues related to its effect on the criminal’s mind were still debated even in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the major evolutions was that, instead of punishing bodies, the new systems introduced aimed at reforming not simply the soul, but also the inner nature of the criminal; the main challenge was at the same time to respect human dignity, to punish but also to reform. The belief in the concept of the born-criminal, however, posed serious problems as far as the ideas of moral reformation and rehabilitation were concerned. What Dickens and

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Hugo have in common is their sense of society’s responsibility in the problems of criminality and violence.80 Punishment is necessary, but while society punishes it must also take into consideration the background of the offender, and the influences under which he committed his crime. The anonymity of Hugo’s hero suggests that he could be anybody and that society—while it condemns the deviant—must instruct the “normal” and explicitly posit the rules of a civilised social life. Punishment, no matter how harsh depending on the severity of the crime, must preserve the humanity of the individual who undergoes it in order to confirm the legitimacy of the power which exercises it. The desire to change and improve the criminal naturally coincides with a desire to improve society through change and self-questioning. The contemporary history of prison and punishment reveals that these issues are controversial even today and that it is essential to set a clear line between “punishment” and “vengeance”, in order to reinforce the fabric of society and to ensure that laws are respected and understood.

Bibliography Beccaria, Cesare. On Crimes and Punishments. Translated by David Young. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986. Bouizem, Zineb. “L’Expression de l’Orthodoxie Victorienne à travers le Symbole du Feu dans Jane Eyre et A Tale of Two Cities” in Le Feu, Symbole Identitaire, edited by Fabien Chartier and Kolawolé Elecho, 89-101. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution: A History. 1837. New York: Modern Library, 2002. Collins, Philip. Dickens and Crime. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1965. Davie, Neil. “Entre le Fou et le Sauvage: les Théories Scientifiques du Criminel en Angleterre (1850-1914),” in Corps Etrangers, edited by Michel Prum, 129-161. Paris: Syllepses, 2002. Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Edited by A. Sanders. 1859. London: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998. —. Pictures from Italy. Edited by K. Flint. 1846. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Emsley, Clive. Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900. 3rd ed. Harlow: Pearson-Longman, 2004. Forster, John. Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872 -74. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

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Hugo, Victor. Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné, précédé de Bug-Jargal. Edited by Roger Borderie. 1829. Paris : Gallimard, 1975. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883-85. Oxford: OUP, 2005. Paroissien, David, ed. Selected Letters of Charles Dickens. London: Macmillan, 1985. Perrot, Michelle. Les Ombres de l’Histoire: Crime et Châtiment au XIXe siècle. Paris : Flammarion, 2001. Slater, Michael. Dickens’s Journalism, “Gone Astray” and Other Papers from Household Words, 1851-59. London: J. M. Dent, 1998. Stone, Harry. The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994. Storey, Graham and Kenneth J. Fielding, eds. The Letters of Charles Dickens, 1847-9, vol. 5. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Trumble, Alfred. In Jail with Charles Dickens. Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2005. Vanfasse, Nathalie. Charles Dickens: Entre Normes et Déviance. Aix-enProvence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2007. Woodward, E. Llewellyn. The Age of Reform, 1815-1870, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Woollen, Geoff, ed. and trans. The Last Day of a Condemned Man and Other Prison Writings. Oxford: OUP, 1992. Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2008.

Notes 1

In 1832, Hugo also added a long preface to Dernier Jour. Hugo writes “cette peine, la plus irréparable des peines irréparables”. Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné, précédé de Bug-Jargal, ed. by Roger Borderie (1829 ; Paris : Gallimard, 1975), 398. In translation, “Of all the irreparable punishments the most irreparable.” Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man and Other Prison Writings, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Woollen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 29. 3 In 1827, Charles Lucas published Du Système Pénal et du Système Répressif en Général, de la Peine de Mort en Particulier. See also Michelle Perrot’s study, Les Ombres de l’Histoire : Crime et Châtiment au XIXe Siècle (Paris : Flammarion, 2001). 4 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 376: “The Last Day of a Condemned Man is nothing less than an appeal, direct or indirect as the reader wishes, for the abolition of the death penalty.” (Woollen, Last Day, 12). 2

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Hugo, Dernier Jour, 379: “[It] is good to wash one’s hands, but to prevent the blood from being spilled on them would be better.” (Woollen, Last Day,14). 6 These letters can be found in David Paroissien’s Selected Letters of Charles Dickens (London: Macmillan, 1985), “Capital Punishment,” 211-259; adjectives are quoted from 211-218. What is also interesting is Dickens’s awareness of the role played by the media—and here, more precisely, by editors—in major social issues. An editor himself, he felt responsible for what was published in the journals he directed because of their impact on the public. Accordingly, Dickens strove to be as vocal as possible in his criticism of capital punishment, but it is noteworthy that he was not really convinced that there could be rapid and major changes. In his letter to W. W. F. de Cerjat (December 29, 1849), he wrote: “My letters [on capital punishment] have made a great to-do, and led to a great agitation of the subject; but I have not a confident belief in any change being made.” The Letters of Charles Dickens, 1847-9, ed. Graham Storey and Kenneth J. Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 5: 683. 7 See chapter 10 of Pictures from Italy, entitled “Rome.” 8 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 295: “Today they put the irons on the convicts who are off to Toulon tomorrow.” (Woollen, Last Day, 49). 9 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 296: “Any diversion at all, however disgusting, was welcome to a solitary detainee. I accepted his offer to look on.” (Woollen, Last Day, 49). 10 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 295: “A few days ago, I saw a most hideous sight.” (Woollen, Last Day, 49). 11 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 299: “[Crime] turned this degrading punishment into a family celebration” (Woollen, Last Day, 52). 12 Dernier Jour, 334: “The muffled shouts that I hear outside, the gleeful spectators already swarming along the embankments, the gendarmes getting ready in their barracks, the black-gowned priest, and the other man with the red hands, all of it is for me!” (Woollen, Last Day, 76). 13 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 334; Woollen, Last Day, 76. 14 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 339: “the horrible, bloodthirsty crowd” (Woollen, Last Day, 80). In the Oxford translation, Woollen uses the word “bloodthirsty,” which is translated in French as “assoiffé de sang,” but in the original piece, Hugo uses a more vampiric image as he literally describes them as blood-drinkers (“buveurs de sang”), as if, instead of being wine lovers, the traditional French stereotype, they preferred the taste of blood. 15 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 363: “the goulish spectators stand and wait, yelping and cackling” (Woollen, Last Day, 96). 16 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 366: “the heads of a thousand shrieking spectators crammed one on top of the other” (Woollen, Last Day, 98). 17 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 368: “Dealers in human blood” (Woollen, Last Day, 99). 18 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Andrew Sanders (London: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), 304. 19 Ibid., 271, and note 505. 20 Ibid., 336.

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21 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 402: “Strange as it might seem, the guillotine itself constituted progress. / Monsieur Guillotin was a philanthropist.” (Woollen, Last Day, 32). 22 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 388-90; Woollen, Last Day, 21-3. 23 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 335: “The name of the thing is appalling” (Woollen, Last Day, 76) 24 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 335: “The way these ten letters combine, their expression and their outward appearance are propitious to horrid imaginings, and the wretched doctor who invented the apparatus had a predestined name. The image that I attach to this hideous word is all the more distressing for being vague and indeterminate. Each syllable is like a part of the machine, whose monstrous framework is being built and dismantled unceasingly in my mind” (Woollen, Last Day, 76-7). 25 In a letter to the editors of The Daily News (February 23, 1846), Dickens argued that capital sentences are uttered “by men of fallible judgment, whose powers of arriving at the truth are limited, and in whom there is the capacity of mistake and false deduction.” He insists that the “Probability of mistake is not required. The barest Possibility of mistake is a sufficient reason against the taking of a life which nothing can restore.” (Paroissien, Selected Letters, 215-6). 26 Darnay is “Drawn to the Loadstone Rock,” which is the title of chapter 24 of book 2. 27 See Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, 302-3, and also note 509. 28 The biblical reference from John 2: 25-6 is repeated four times in the novel in relation with Carton: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.” (Ibid., 387, 388, 389, 464). 29 Nathalie Vanfasse, Charles Dickens: Entre Normes et Déviance (Aix-enProvence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2007), 66. 30 He laments, “Si on lit un jour mon histoire, après tant d’années d’innocence et de bonheur, on ne voudra pas croire à cette année exécrable, qui s’ouvre par un crime et se clôt par un supplice” (Hugo, Dernier Jour, 347-8) “If one day my story is read, it will seem incredible that so many years of innocence and happiness are followed by this abominable year, beginning with crime and ending with punishment” (Woollen, Last Day, 85). 31 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 348: “o wretched laws and wretched men, I was not an evil man!” (Woollen, Last Day, 85). 32 The Law Court of Paris. 33 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 329: “I started to kill for a living” (Woollen, Last Day, 72). 34 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 326. 35 All capital offences were listed in what was known as the Bloody Code. See, for instance, Clive Emsley’s study on Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900, 3rd ed. (Harlow: Pearson-Longman, 2004). 36 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 307: “I have an illness, a terminal condition, and a manmade one at that.” (Woollen, Last Day, 57). 37 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 394 : “transport us back to the sixteenth century, be truly terrifying, give us the whole range of tortures, … give us the gibbet, the wheel, the

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stake, skinning, cropping, drawing, the pit for burial alive, the pot for boiling alive.” (Woollen, Last Day, 26). 38 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 397: “At the root of [the] ingratiating discourse [of the rulers] you will find only hardness of heart, cruelty, barbarism … Beneath the silken paw of the judge, the claws of the executioner can be felt” (Woollen, Last Day, 28). 39 His choice was partly influenced by his friend Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (1837). On the uncontrollable, violent nature of revolutionaries in A Tale of Two Cities, see also Zineb Bouizem, “L’Expression de l’Orthodoxie Victorienne à travers le Symbole du Feu dans Jane Eyre et A Tale of Two Cities.”, Le Feu, Symbole Identitaire, ed. Fabien Chartier and Kolawolé Elecho (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 89-101. 40 Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, 1. 41 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his theory is actually that “punishment” is often the pretext through which “revenge” can be satisfied. See part 2, section entitled “Of Redemption.” 42 Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, 205, and note on 502. Hugo mentions the case in A Comedy about a Tragedy (Woollen, Last Day, 10). 43 Dickens, Tale of Cities, 264. 44 Ibid., 335. 45 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 15. “Public executions were then perceived as a centre where violence could be rekindled” (my translation). 46 “Madame Defarge [had] trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation.” (Tale of Two Cities, 268). And also, “[revolutionaries] seated on the bodies of their victims.” (Ibid., 333). 47 See Ibid., 271 and 273 (and note 8 of this chapter). 48 If grass grows from him, and if they accept Foulon’s injunction to “eat grass,” then it would implicitly mean eating him. Dickens’s “The Long Voyage” (Household Words, 31 December 1853) is an important source concerning his views on cannibalism. The issue is also discussed by Harry Stone, in The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994). “The Long Voyage” can be found in the third volume of Michael Slater’s edition of Dickens’s Journalism, “Gone Astray” and Other Papers from Household Words, 1851-59 (London: J.M. Dent, 1998), 180-190. 49 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 300-1; Woollen, Last Day, 52-3. 50 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 379: “the inviolability of human life” (Woollen, Last Day, 15). 51 Parroissien, Selected Letters, 216. 52 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 393: “You say, ‘society must exact vengeance, and society must punish.’ Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual, and punishment from God. Society is poised between the two. Punishment is too far above, and vengeance too far beneath it. Nothing so great or so petty can be appropriate. We must not ‘strike in vengeance’ but improve by correction” (Woollen, Last Day, 25).

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53 E. Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815-1870, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), book 4, chapter 1, “The Organization of a Civilized Social Life,” 444-73. 54 Also the title of part 3, chapter 1 of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. 55 Perrot, Les Ombres, 69. Bentham’s theory is encapsulated in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). 56 Ibid., 76. 57 Quoted in ibid., 48 (my translation). See especially chapter 27 of Dei Delitti e Delle Pene, “Of the mildness of punishments”: “The certainty of a chastisement, even if it be moderate, will always make a greater impression than the fear of a more terrible punishment that is united with the hope of impunity.” Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, trans. David Young (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986), 46. 58 Alfred Trumble, In Jail with Charles Dickens (Amsterdam, NL: Fredonia Books, 2005), 1. 59 Dickens even befriended the doctor of the prison, Monsieur Verdeil. Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1965), 131. 60 See notably “A visit to Newgate,” Sketches by Boz (1836); chapters 6 and 7 of American Notes, respectively “New York” and “Philadelphia and its Solitary Prison” (1842); John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872-74), especially book 5, chapter 5 where the visit to the prison of Lausanne is mentioned); and chapter 10 of Pictures from Italy, “Rome.” 61 “The Villa Bagnerello: or the Pink Jail, a far more expressive name for the mansion: is in one of the most splendid situations imaginable”. Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, ed. Kate Flint (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 31. 62 Neil Davie, “Entre le Fou et le Sauvage: les Théories Scientifiques du Criminel en Angleterre (1850-1914)” in Corps Etrangers, ed. Michel Plum (Paris: Syllepses, 2002), 129-161. 63 Ibid., 129. 64 Quoted in Ibid., 130. In Oliver Twist, Charlotte expresses the same views after Oliver and Noah have a violent fight: “I only hope this’ll teach master [Mr Sowerberry] not to have any more of these dreadful creaturs [orphaned boys like Oliver], that are born to be murderers and robbers from their very cradle” (chapter 6). 65 The Puritan principle of Predestination obviously also explains the theory of the “born-criminal,” and again the challenge of penologists was to find a middle-way between such fatalism and reforms which were less radical (the “born-criminal” theory gave birth to eugenics). 66 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 283; Woollen, Last Day, 41. 67 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 330; Woollen, Last Day, 73. 68 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 284: “When we hear this language spoken, it’s like a bundle of filthy, scabby rags being shaken in your face” (Woollen, Last Day, 41). 69 The influence of the milieu in the perpetration of evil is the subject of Philip Zimbardo’s compelling book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (London: Rider and Co., 2007), in which he argues that immoral

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or illegal acts are not committed exclusively by “bad” people, but that a series of factors (the environment, a specific situation, as well as a whole range of psychological factors) can account for such behaviours. 70 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 332: “Charity was the furthest from my mind! I was full of ill will. I wish I could strangle him with my bare hands, the old thief! And trampled him underfoot! I feel my heart full of rage and bitterness. I think that my sac of bile has burst. Death turns you nasty.” (Woollen, Last Day, 74-5). 71 Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, 347. 72 Perrot, Les Ombres, 88. 73 Ibid., 73. For the Evangelical perspective, see Jonas Hanway’s Solitude in Imprisonment (London: for J. Bew, 1776). 74 Collins, Dickens and Crime, 140. 75 Dickens, Tale of Two Cities, 243. 76 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 314: “Everything around me is a prison; I find the prison in every shape and form, in human guise as much as in the bars or in the bolts. This wall is a prison of stone; this door is a prison of wood; these warders are a prison of flesh and blood. Prison is some loathsome creature, one and indivisible, half building and half man. I am its prey …” (Woollen, Last Day, 62-3). 77 Perrot, Les Ombres, 63. 78 Hugo, Dernier Jour, 291: “They are covered with writing, drawing, strange shapes, ...” (Woollen, Last Day, 46). 79 Perrot, Les Ombres, 93. 80 In 1847, Dickens and Hugo met in Paris, at Victor Hugo’s house. This encounter is mentioned by John Forster, in his Life of Charles Dickens (see book 5, chapter 7, “Three Months in Paris (1846-7)"). But nothing is said about their views on crime and the penal systems of France and England, though both men did share many views on the subject. Hugo is also mentioned in one of Dickens’s letters, addressed to Emile de la Rue on 24 March 1847, in which he writes that Hugo “looks like a Genius.” Letters of Charles Dickens, 1847-1849, 5:15. Nothing more is suggested about a possible discussion on the topic of crime and punishment.

CHAPTER TWELVE FRENCH VIEWS OF VICTORIAN ARCHITECTURE IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY: CÉSAR DALY’S AND NAPOLÉON DIDRON’S ARCHITECTURAL CRITICISM ODILE BOUCHER-RIVALAIN

Among the many fields in which mutual influences can be found in the cultural histories of Britain and France, architecture is particularly important. Its development in the nineteenth century reflects the economic expansion of both countries in the heyday of industrialization, and raises the crucial question of national identity in an age of political changes affecting most, if not all, European countries. Given that numerous signs of mutual influence can be found in the architecture of the two nations, whether in the design of civic buildings, railway stations, bridges, or churches, it is in the mutual vision of England and France that the reasons for such influence can be identified. The awareness of the French and the British of the importance of their past history at a time of deeply felt changes, and their acute consciousness of having to face a challenging future, are both at work in the architectural debates of the 1840s. This paper will look at two influential French architectural magazines of that decade, César Daly’s Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publics and Napoléon Didron’s Annales Archéologiques, in order to examine their vision of their national architecture and how it related to Victorian architecture at that period. 1840 was a key date in the political life of France: a strong movement in favour of social reform was sweeping over the country during the July monarchy. It was in that particular context that César Daly, a twenty-nineyear old architect imbued with the utopian ideals of Fourier and Saint Simon, launched a review in which architecture was viewed both from an academic perspective and a practical and utilitarian one: hence its name,

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La Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publics. In 1838 Daly had published in the journal La Phalange a series of articles on the social system advocated by Robert Owen. The architectural journal which he launched in 1840 was based on his belief in an international collaboration between science and art. In his preface to the inaugural issue, Daly emphasized the necessary collaboration between science and art, and between the various nations of the world for the benefit of science and mankind at large. He saw the periodical press as an ideal tool for work of this kind, as it allowed a regular updating of information and a large-scale diffusion of ideas across nations: Une Revue périodique était la seule forme qui pût convenir à l’expression de cette association (art et science, architectes et ingénieurs) … C’est à l’heure qu’il est, et en dépit du désordre qui règne dans les travaux intellectuels, l’esprit de recherche est devenu tellement actif, que la science grandit avec une prodigieuse vitesse et que les nouvelles découvertes de tous les jours rendent incomplets les ouvrages les plus consciencieux publiés la veille. Il devient dès lors nécessaire de les compléter par des écrits périodiques, destinés à maintenir les hommes de l’art et ceux qui s’intéressent à l’art au courant de ses progrès quasi-quotidiens. Aussi convient-il que chaque ordre d’idées soit représenté dans la presse par un organe périodique, une Revue, qui puisse servir de lien entre les hommes spéciaux de tous les pays, en constituant entre eux une association intellectuelle au profit de la science, de l’humanité et d’eux-mêmes.1

Daly pointed out the international collaboration he had already established, and which he hoped to extend further as a necessity for modern times: Nous avons déjà établi des relations directes avec des hommes marquants dans les différentes capitales de l’Europe : ces relations ne pourront que s’accroître et augmenter d’intérêt.2

This initiative proved rapidly successful, since the Revue Genérale came to occupy the first rank in the French architectural press and its strong influence lasted for fifty years until it came to an end in 1890. It was available in London, distributed by the publisher and bookseller, John Weale, and could be read in many libraries in England.3 Only four years after it was first published, its editor César Daly received the distinction of being elected to the status of honorary member and correspondent of the Royal Institute of British Architects: “The Royal Institute of British Architects has thus shown its esteem for the works published by our fellow architectural writer on various branches of architecture”.4 As a

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staunch believer in Charles Fourier’s philosophical and economic ideals, Daly felt very much concerned by the importance of the relationships between France and foreign nations, believing that a worldwide collaboration would eventually emerge, destined to achieve a complete fusion of cultural and national identities, based on free frontiers and a multiplicity of rapid communication media which would produce a “fusion moléculaire” (molecular fusion) of the various nations.5 In his exhaustive study of Daly’s journal, Marc Saboya mentions the collaboration between the antiquary Thomas Wright and the celebrated architect Pugin, but points out the very few contributions by foreign critics to the Revue, in spite of Daly’s high expectations of Anglo-French collaboration. The engineer E. Chappell wrote a contribution on the new engines of steamers in 1841, and in 1857 Charles Barry wrote on the mechanical scaffolding which his father had used to rebuild the Palace of Westminster.6 Why did Daly have an especial interest in English architecture? Several reasons can be suggested. In the first issue of the Revue, Daly published an article entitled “Résumé du Voyage d’un Architecte en Angleterre” subtitled “Telle cause, tel effet. Telle société, telle architecture” (“A French Architect’s Tour in England. Like causes, like effects. Like society, like architecture”). What had struck Daly on his English tour was that England was a land of contrasts, very much attached to its traditions while it was also the leading nation in the world in terms of industrial and economic progress. Its architecture mirrored such contrasts, he thought, as a still relatively powerful aristocracy continued to own much of the land on which new buildings were raised. One is struck, he wrote, by … la grandeur et la rapidité de l’essor industriel de l’Angleterre, et la vénération de ses habitants pour tout ce que le temps a consacré dans ses mœurs et ses institutions. Nous verrons figurer dans l’architecture tous les contrastes et toutes les contradictions qui caractérisent si particulièrement la Grande Bretagne, où une aristocratie riche et puissante conserve encore la propriété de la majeure partie du sol. 7

Thus, it was the question of the impact of national identity on architectural projects which interested Daly. This appears very clearly in his description of Charles Barry’s Travellers’ Club, recently built in London (1829-1832), where he argues that the institution of clubhouses was indicative of a nation with a strict social hierarchy, and of the deplorable effects of a class division, which France had happily rejected.8 The strong social orientation of Daly’s mission was informed by the idea that architecture had a role to play in the social and moral progress of

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society, and in this respect, he pointed out that England was a model, being an industrial nation where industry and science served the interests of art. As a case in point, he emphasized the fact that a Select Committee had been appointed by the government in 1835 to encourage the combination of art and science. His article was significantly entitled “Solidarity between Science and Art”: … pour étudier l’état des arts en Grande-Bretagne et leur influence sur l’industrie manufacturière : question de solidarité, d’action réciproque soulevée par des nécessités commerciales et les exigences de la concurrence industrielle. … Voici l’économie politique amenée à déclarer la solidarité du beau et de l’utile, de la poésie et de la mécanique, de l’art, de la science et de l’industrie, de toutes les facultés humaines, de l’homme enfin … Nous voyons dans cette reconnaissance réciproque des deux grandes facultés qui distinguent l’Angleterre et la France, un germe d’union future qu’il appartient au siècle de faire éclore. Il faut, dit-on, l’union de l’art et de l’industrie pour que les produits manufacturiers atteignent leur plus grande perfection: la France est artiste, l’Angleterre est industrielle, et vous ne concluez pas à une association inévitable de ces deux forces sous l’influence du progrès et du temps?9

It was precisely on the point of making technical progress applicable to building and architecture that Daly considered England as a model to be imitated. In reviewing William Henry Leeds’s Studies on Modern Architecture in 1840, he reminded his readers that the building techniques contribute to the aesthetic effects that the architect aims to produce and concluded that, surprisingly, Leeds was not conscious enough of the importance of building techniques and adopted a strictly aesthetic approach overlooking essential aspects.10 Through his conception of architecture as a combination between art and science, Daly’s aim was to renew the traditional vision of architecture in France. As Siegfried Giedion has pointed out in his book Space, Time, Architecture, the creation of the École Polytechnique in France in 1794 made the division between art and science an official reality, with the École des Beaux Arts and the École Polytechnique existing side by side instead of working together.11 Deploring this harmful division of French cultural institutions, he pleaded for a renewed conception of architecture. Indeed, he opposed the classical style favoured by the École des Beaux Arts as much as he opposed the rational conception of Gothic propagated by Viollet-le-Duc and his followers, as well as the eclectic movement which was very much in vogue during the Third Republic period. He therefore looked beyond the French cultural traditions and advocated the principle and practice of relativism, adopting a similar stance to that of his English colleague and

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friend, Thomas Donaldson, who had declared that “There is no longer one dominant style, as we are wandering in a maze of experiments.”12 Daly fought for a less narrow vision than the traditional division into the various architectural styles and had a more global comprehension of art, suggesting that architects should borrow elements from various cultures in different periods of their history. Such was his view of the architecture of the future: “Une architecture nouvelle, un style nouveau, qui nous sorte de la stérilité et du servilisme de la copie, c’est ce que chacun demande; c’est ce que le public attend”.13 In considering England as a reforming nation which he envied and admired for its enjoyment of a greater degree of freedom than France could achieve under the authority of the Académie des Beaux Arts, Daly saw the development and improvement of architecture as a priority in industrial nations. In an article he wrote in 1845 entitled “Nouvelle Architecture à l’Usage des Prolétaires Anglais” (“A New Architecture for the English Working-Class”), he acknowledged the initiatives taken in London to improve housing for the working-class and presented it as an example that France ought to follow, considering architecture as an instrument of social reform: Londres, la ville monstre des temps modernes, s’est enfin émue au spectacle de ses propres misères. Des esprits éclairés, des hommes de cœur, ont constitué une association en vue d’améliorer par tous les moyens possibles les habitations des classes ouvrières, « Association for improving the dwellings of the industrious class » … ces innovations méritent toute l’attention des architectes, comme déjà elles attirent celle des gouvernements … L’ordre matériel engendre l’ordre moral, nous l’avons souvent répété. Nos architectes devront faire des recherches dans cette voie nouvelle; il y a là pour eux beaucoup d’amélioration à projeter, de grands travaux à exécuter.14

Although Daly insisted on the innovating capacities of modern techniques in their application to architecture, it should not be assumed that he denied the importance of tradition. The question of deciding whether building in the Gothic style was relevant in the mid-nineteenth century came to the forefront in the mid-eighteen-forties and Daly actively took part in the debate. The project of building a new church in Paris, situated on the Place Bellechasse, gave the debate a particular polemical turn in 1845, allowing Daly to state his own position in relation to a recently-founded journal, Les Annales Archéologiques.15 It was in 1844 that Adolphe Napoléon Didron launched his review Les Annales Archéologiques in order to investigate the field of archaeology. It was no doubt his position as Secretary to the Comité Historique des Arts et

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Monuments which made the enterprise possible. The creation of the new journal was due, as Saboya points out, to a division between Daly and his collaborators, some of whom joined Didron in his venture of launching a new periodical in which their ideas would be fully represented. His close collaboration with Viollet-le-Duc ensured Viollet’s regular contribution to the journal.16 In his preface to the first issue, Didron stated his official position, which was to study the cultural heritage of past times and defunct cultures in order to draw inspiration from them and adapt them rationally to the needs of the present: this was clearly a denial of the narrower vision of archaeology which could and did tend towards mere antiquarianism. In aiming to cover the complete field of Christian and pagan archaeology, Didron was looking far beyond the limits of the French cultural heritage: Le domaine complet de l’archéologie est de connaître le passé tout entier pour préparer l’avenir. … Nous voulons, en effet, étudier l’archéologie païenne et chrétienne, l’archéologie de l’Asie, de l’Egypte, de la Grèce, de Rome; celle des nations de l’Europe occidentale sous les civilisations antiques et modernes, du paganisme et du moyen âge. Savoir, c’est prévoir. Comment la passé peut-il être utile au présent et à l’avenir ? … Les hommes pour éxécuter et les modèles à choisir manquent: l’un des buts essentiels des Annales Archéologiques est précisément de donner les modèles et de faire connaître les artistes instruits et habiles.17

Didron made a point of drawing lessons from the past in order to face the present demands more efficiently. This was the message that he hammered home, reiterating his position in each successive volume of his journal: Mais en tout ceci encore, il ne s’agit que de la science pure, que de la spéculation, que du passé; et l’avenir, et la conservation ou la consolidation dans les monuments anciens, la construction des monuments nouveaux, ne devons-nous pas nous en occuper beaucoup, souvent, à tous les instants ? Est-ce que le vandalisme s’arrêterait par hasard, est-ce que la France obéirait au bon goût, aux saines doctrines esthétiques?18

In this venture Didron was enthusiastically supported by Victor Hugo who had popularised medieval Gothic architecture in his novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831). Hugo paid homage to Didron and his fellow antiquaries for their contribution which, he said, was complementary to that of the poet: Vous êtes du petit nombre des esprits élevés et patients qui expliquent, savamment et poétiquement, à l’Europe son architecture, à l’Eglise son symbolisme, au prêtre sa cathédrale, à tous les peuples leur passé, à tous

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les arts leur avenir. … C’est grâce à quelques hommes comme vous que l’Europe voit se tourner aujourd’hui l’art si profond, si étrange et si admirable du moyen âge, non seulement tous les antiquaires, mais encore tous les penseurs. Pour les uns, c’est une étude; pour les autres, c’est une contemplation.19

Didron’s concern for the preservation and restoration of medieval architecture made him turn to England as a model in the field of archaeolology. Just as Daly had done, it was Didron’s purpose to open his periodical to foreign contributors and correspondents who would give accounts of what went on abroad in the field of archaeology. England held a special place in Didron’s heart and he expressed his admiration for the vitality of the English antiquarian movement in an article entitled “Archaeology in England” published in 1847: “Nous sommes pénétrés de respect pour la gravité que les Anglais mettent dans leurs actions et leurs écrits”.20 He travelled to London in 1851 to visit the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace and to look at the antiquarians’ contributions (stained windows, jewellery, and tapestry), and to assess how far the Annales Archéologiques may have been influential in encouraging the return to medieval craftsmanship. On his return to France, he published his observations in a brief study entitled L’Archéologie en Angleterre, acknowledging England’s leadership in the field and expressing the hope that France will follow suit, praising “le mouvement archéologique auquel ce grand pays obéit avec un entraînement irrésistible et un véritable bonheur . Pourquoi n’en est-il pas ainsi chez nous?”.21 Didron could not altogether admit that France was somehow lagging behind, and acknowledged the mutual enrichment of France and England in the field of archaeology by pointing out that the two most recent archaeological journals in England, The Archaeological Journal and Archaeologia Cambrensis, were the result of the example set by the Annales Archéologiques: Ces relations d’archéologie internationales nous seront d’une utilité incontestable. Nous sommes heureux de voir que les regards de nos voisins s’attachent sur la France quand il s’agit d’archéologie. … Jamais, répétonsle, on a été témoin d’un mouvement archéologique pareil à celui qui s’étend sur l’Europe.22

Didron also made a point of highlighting the fact that the four major English archaeological journals had special links with the French Comité Historique des Arts et des Monuments, this being in itself being a remarkable and promising achievement as far as cultural exchanges between France and England were concerned.

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Conclusion In conclusion, the decade of the 1840s turns out to be a period during which cultural exchanges were particularly numerous and fruitful between France and England, as can be seen from this analysis of Daly’s and Didron’s views of England’s architectural achievements. If France had traditionally been looked up by England as an artistic model, it seems that England had now taken the lead, as we have shown in several instances. Both Daly and Didron were somewhat anxious that France might gradually lose its leadership in the field of architecture, and never missed an occasion to point out that England was in some way or other indebted to France. The Builder, the leading architectural journal founded by George Godwin in 1842, was almost certainly created in imitation of the Revue Générale de l’Architecture, first appearing only two years after Daly had launched his review.23 Beyond this perceptible rivalry for architectural leadership in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, it is tempting to see in those cultural exchanges and mutual influences a pre-entente cordiale desire on both parts to establish a long-term cooperation. After all, the Gothic revival in the eighteen-forties in both England and France signaled a common concern: returning to the roots of national cultural identity to fight against the incongruities and excesses that modern times had brought with them, exemplified by the description of the building erected in Leeds and described in the Revue Générale de l’Architecture with much contemptuous irony: Rien, assurément, ne pouvait être plus à propos, que de remettre en évidence ces préceptes, au moment où les constructeurs anglais empruntaient aux albums de leurs infatigables touristes les formes de toutes les architectures du monde, sans nul souci de la destination des édifices, où l’on élevait comme à Leeds, par exemple, un péristyle égyptien de dix-huit colonnes de grande proportion pour servir de façade à une filature dont les voûtes, recouvertes de terre, étaient comparées à une campagne aux molles ondulations.24

Bibliography Anonymous. “Constructions Nouvelles, en Style Gothique, à l’Etranger’, Annales Archéologiques 4 (1846): 128-130. —. “Notice Nécrologique: A.W.N. Pugin”. Revue Génerale de l’Architecture 10 (1852): cols. 36-40. Beresford-Hope, Alexander. “Archaéologie en Angleterre”. Annales Archéologiques 6 (1847) : 65-70.

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Boucher-Rivalain, Odile. “Attitudes to Gothic in French Architectural Writings of the 1840s”. Architectural History 41 (1998): 145-152. Brooks, Chris. The Gothic Revival. London: Phaidon, 1999. Collins, Peter. Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750-1950. London: Faber, 1965. Daly, César. “Architecture de l’Avenir”. Revue Générale de l’Architecture 8 (1849-1850): cols. 26-27. —. “Architecture Privée Monumentale. Club des Voyageurs”. Revue Générale de l’Architecture 1 (1840): cols. 327-333. —. “Bibliographie. Études sur l’Architecture Moderne Anglaise, par M. W. H. Leeds (1)”. Revue Générale de l’Architecture 1 (1840): cols. 616-618. —. “Chronique”. Revue Générale de l’Architecture 5 (1844): col. 96. —. “Introduction”. Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publics 1 (1840) : cols. 1-7. —. “Introduction”. Revue Générale de l’Architecture 19 (1861): cols. 110. —. “Nouvelle Architecture à l’Usage de Prolétaires Anglais”. Revue Générale de l’Architecture 6 (1845-6): cols. 150-55. —. “Résumé d’un Voyage d’un Architecte en Angleterre”. Revue Générale de l’Architecture 1 (1840): cols. 157-161. —. “Solidarité entre l’Industrie et l’Art”. Revue Générale de l’Architecture 7 (1847): cols. 290-96. Didron, Napoléon. L’Archéologie en Angleterre. Paris : Librairie Archéologique de Victor Didron, 1851. —. “Aux Nos Abonnés”. Annales Archéologiques 2 (1845): 1-4. —. “Introduction”. Annales Archéologiques 1 (1844): 1-4. —. “Lettre de M. Victor Hugo”. Annales Archéologiques 2 (1845): 37. Ford, Boris., ed. The Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain. Romantics to Early Victorians, 1785-1851. Vol. 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Frankl, Paul. The Gothic. Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. Giedion, Siegfried. Espace, Temps, Architecture. Paris: Denoël, 1978. Hill, Rosemary. God’s Architect. Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Lemoine, Bertrand. L’Architecture du fer. France XIXe siècle. Paris: Champ Vallon, 1986. Pevsner, Nikolaus. Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.

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—. The West Riding. The Buildings of England Series. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959. Saboya, Marc. Presse et architecture au XIXe siècle. La Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publics. Paris: Picard, 1991.

Notes 1

César Daly, “Introduction”, Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publics 1 (1840) : col. 4. “A periodical review presented itself as the only suitable form for the expression of this association (between art and science, architects and engineers) … At the present time, and in spite of the chaos in which intellectual pursuits are plunged, the general spirit of research has become so active that science is advancing at a prodigious speed and the discoveries made one day become outdated the next day. It, therefore, becomes necessary to complete them with periodical publications destined to keep artists and all those interested in art informed of its almost daily progress. It is thus both desirable and suitable that each field of knowledge be represented by a periodical review which will serve as a link between the specialists of all countries, thus establishing between them a worldwide community of intellectuals for the benefit of science, of mankind at large as well as for their own benefit” (my translation). 2 Ibid., col. 7. “We have already established contacts with outstanding men in various European capitals: such links can only expand and increase in interest” (my translation). 3 See Marc Saboya, Presse et Architecture au XIXe siècle. La Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publics (Paris: Picard, 1991), 101. 4 César Daly, “Chronique”, Revue Générale de l’Architecture 5 (1844) : col. 95. The article included the letter sent by T.L. Donaldson, vice-president of the RIBA. 5 César Daly, “Introduction”, Revue Générale de l’Architecture 19 (1861): cols. 56. 6 Saboya, Presse et Architecture, 182. 7 César Daly, “Résumé d’un Voyage d’un Architecte en Angleterre”, Revue Générale de l’Architecture 1 (1840) : col. 158: “the vastness and the rapidity of industrial expansion and by the veneration in which people hold what time has consecrated in the national traditions and institutions. Its architecture shows evidence of all the contrasts and contradictions which are so characteristic of Great Britain where a wealthy and powerful aristocracy still owns most of the land” (my translation). 8 César Daly, “Architecture Privée Monumentale. Club des Voyageurs”, Revue Générale de l’Architecture 1 (1840): cols. 327-333. 9 César Daly, “Solidarité entre l’Industrie et l’Art”, Revue Générale de l’Architecture 7 (1847): col. 292: “in order to examine the present condition of the arts in England and their influence on the manufacturing activities, which is a matter of solidarity and of collaboration required by commercial and industrial development … We have come to a stage when political economy acknowledges the necessary combination between the beautiful and the useful, poetry and

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mechanics, of art, of science and of industry, of all human capabilities, of man in his entirety … We see in this mutual acknowledgement of the two great faculties distinguishing England from France the seed of a forthcoming union to which it is our duty in this century to contribute ... We maintain that the collaboration between art and industry is necessary for manufactured goods to attain the highest degree of perfection: France is an artistic nation, England is an industrial nation. It is impossible not to see here an inevitable source of collaboration of these two forces under the influence of time and progress” (my translation). 10 César Daly, “Bibliographie. Études sur l’Architecture Moderne Anglaise, par M. W. H. Leeds (1)”, Revue Générale de l’Architecture 1 (1840): cols. 616-618. 11 Siegfried Giedion, Espace, Temps, Architecture (Paris : Denoël, 1990), 141. 12 Saboya, Presse et Architecture, 193 13 César Daly, “Architecture de l’Avenir”, Revue Générale de l’Architecture 8 (1849-1850) : col. 26. “A new architecture, a new style that will drive us away from the sterility and servility of copying, this is what the public expects and desires” (my translation). 14 César Daly, “Nouvelle Architecture à l’Usage de Prolétaires Anglais”, Revue Générale de l’Architecture 6 (1845-6): cols. 153-155: “London, the gigantic city of modern times, has eventually been moved at the sight of its population living in utter destitution. A number of enlightened individuals and kind-hearted men have founded an association in order to improve by all possible means the dwellings of the working-class. (“Association for improving the dwellings of the industrious class”) Such innovations deserve architects’ attention as they have aroused the interest of the political authorities … Material order engenders moral order, as we have often said. Our architects will have to find out new ideas in this direction; there are many improvements they can plan, and major works they can complete” (my translation). See Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750-1950 (London: Faber, 1965), 110. 15 See my article “Attitudes to Gothic in French Architectural Writings of the 1840s”, Architectural History 41 (1998): 145-152. 16 See Paul Frankl, The Gothic. Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 564-574. 17 Napoléon Didron, “Introduction”, Annales Archéologiques 1 (1844): 2-3. “Archaeology consists in studying the past in order to prepare for the future. Indeed, we want to study pagan and Christian architecture, the architecture of Asia, of Egypt, of Greece and of Rome; the architecture of Western nations in antique and modern civilizations from pagan times to the Middle Ages in order to draw useful lessons from the past. We need more men who will do things and more ideas to choose from. One of the main aims of the Annales Archéologiques is precisely to diffuse those ideas and to make knowledgeable and gifted artists better known” (my translation). 18 Napoléon Didron, “Aux Nos Abonnés”, Annales Archéologiques 2 (1845): 3. “But is this only a matter of scholarship, of the strict science of archaeology? Should we not also be concerned, now and at all times, by the future, the preservation and restoration of ancient buildings as well as the construction of new

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buildings? Can we expect vandalism to be overcome all of a sudden and France to adhere instinctively to good taste, to wholesome aesthetic doctrine?” (my translation). 19 Napoléon Didron, “Lettre de M. Victor Hugo”, Annales Archéologiques 2 (1845): 37. “You form a small group of enlightened and patient men who bring a scholarly and poetical contribution to the knowledge of European architecture, explaining to the Church its symbols, to clerical men their cathedrals, to all nations their history, and to all arts their future. … Thanks to men like you, Europe is today witnessing a renewed interest in the profound, strange and wonderful art of the Middle Ages, affecting not only with the antiquarians, but also the poets: for the former, it is the object of scientific study, for the latter, the object of contemplation” (my translation). 20 Alexander Beresford-Hope, “Archaéologie en Angleterre”, Annales Archéologiques 6 (1847): 66, note 3. “We feel much respect for the seriousness manifested by English people in their writings as well as their actions” (my translation). 21 Napoléon Didron, L’Archéologie en Angleterre (Paris : Librairie archéologique de Victor Didron, 1851), 3: “the archaeological movement followed by this great country with an unbounded energy and a genuine happiness. Why couldn’t we do the same in France?” (my translation). 22 Annales Archéologiques, 4 (1846) : 130. “These international relations in archeological questions will be unquestionably of much use and we are glad to see that our neighbours are looking at France as a model in the field of archaeology. Never, let it be said, have we ever witnessed such an archaeological movement as that now extending across Europe” (my translation). 23 See Niklaus Pevsner, “The Battling Builder: Copyism and Originality” in Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 222-237. 24 “Notice Nécrologique: A.W.N. Pugin”, Revue Génerale de l’Architecture, 10 (1853): cols. 36-40, 39. “Nothing, assuredly, could be more appropriate than recalling such principles at the very moment when English architects borrow from travellers’guidebooks the various styles of worldwide architecture, paying no attention whatsoever to the destination and purpose of the building itself. For instance, in Leeds has just been erected an Egyptian peristyle with eighteen columns of great proportions to be the front of a textile factory whose roof, covered with earth, was compared to a smoothly undulating piece of land” (my translation).The reference is to Marshall’s Temple Mill. See Nikolaus Pevsner, The West Riding. The Buildings of England Series, 17 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959).

CHAPTER THIRTEEN INTERACTIONS BETWEEN THE FRENCH AND THE BRITISH GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETIES AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 1870S ISABELLE AVILA

A real craze for explorations developed towards the end of the nineteenth century. The travels of David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley in Africa commanded widespread popular attention, and exploration on that continent was one of the factors that led to the division of Africa into different European colonies. Were explorations conducted in the interests of science or in the interests of specific nations? What were the motives behind the work of geographical societies—especially at the time of the Franco-Prussian War and in its wake, when rivalries between nations were bound to be more prominent? In December 1871, during the Franco-Prussian war, the president of the French geographical society, the Marquis Samuel Prosper de Chasseloup-Laubat, claimed that: in the midst of the cruel fights in which nations in arms throw themselves against one another, in the midst of the terrible passions stirred up by rival ambitions, it is a consoling sight to see science pursuing its work peacefully 1 and rising above the misunderstood interests which divide peoples.

To him, it was extraordinary to see the French geographical society continuing its work during the Franco-Prussian war and it offered clear evidence that geographical science stood above national interests. From this perspective, national rivalries did not seem to govern the work of exploration conducted by geographical societies at the beginning of the 1870s. But was this the reality of the situation, or was this declaration a diplomatic one, one which acknowledged that the journal had a wide audience beyond the French nation and was bound to be read by members

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of geographical societies in other countries? Was the work of these geographical societies informed by national interests? Or did they only aim at producing science in an objective way, uninfluenced by national identities? The development of geography at the end of the nineteenth century has often been linked with nationalism and imperialism. Geographical societies have been seen as the “midwives of imperialism”. 2 The development of geography in France, for example, has been closely related to empire,3 and maps have been read as “weapons of imperialism” by J. B. Harley.4 Explorations taking place in the nineteenth century have therefore been associated with imperialism. Some researchers, such as Giselle Byrnes in Boundary Makers: Land Surveying and the Colonization of New Zealand, have sought to identify the gazes of the explorer (whether material, commercial, and/or scientific, or aesthetic, whether panoptic or picturesque) when looking for the first time at a newly discovered landscape. 5 Hélène Blais and D. Graham Burnett have shown the importance of scientific ideals by pointing out that the surveying instruments used were emphasized to offer scientific validation to an exploration.6 And Isabelle Surun, in her doctoral thesis on exploration in West Africa, has criticized the cause and effect relationship established too easily between scientific practices and the beginning of colonization.7 For Hélène Blais, though, science and expansion remain intrinsically linked and the pursuit of science is not to be separated from its historical context. However, she has also emphasized that the link between science and empire was not always necessary (for in the case of the Pacific, the islands which had been explored by the French were not those which were eventually colonized by them) and that knowledge on space could work independently from ideologies of conquest. 8 There has therefore been a debate in recent scholarship about the link between geography or cartography and imperialism. Considering the role of science in geographical societies and the interactions between science and national and imperial interests can therefore be illuminating, and can contribute to a lively debate. As a result of these questions about the relationship between scientific and imperial interests, the development of geographical societies in the nineteenth century has been the subject of many studies (such as Vincent Berdoulay’s La Formation de l’Ecole Française de Géographie: 18701914 and Felix Driver’s Culture of Exploration and Empire which provides a chapter on “The Royal Geographical Society and the Empire of Science”). Historians have sought to identify to what extent the development of these societies was linked to imperialism (the link is explicitly stated, for example, in Dominique Lejeune’s Les Sociétés de

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Géographie en France et l’Expansion Coloniale au XIXe siècle). 9 Some works such as Geography and Empire, edited by Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, and Geography and Imperialism, 1820-1940, edited by Morag Bell, Robin Butlin and Michael Heffernan, both comprising a series of articles about the link between imperialism and geography, have provided case studies of different European geographical societies. 10 However, although these works have sought sometimes to compare national geographical societies to provincial ones, no thorough study has been done about the interactions between two national geographical societies. Yet a comparison between geographical societies from different nations enables us to unravel the tensions between science and the nation. Keeping in mind the imperial context, the aim of the present chapter is to adopt a less traditional approach than an exploration of the tensions between science and imperialism, and to focus instead on the links between science and nationalism. In order to achieve this, this chapter explores the interactions between two geographical societies belonging to two different nations: the French geographical society (the Société de Géographie of Paris which published the journal Bulletin de la Société de Géographie) and the British geographical society (the Royal Geographical Society of London, the journal for which was the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London). The British geographical society was seen as the touchstone in terms of producing geographical science. It is therefore useful to compare it with the French geographical society, which may be perceived as more responsive to national interests because of the FrancoPrussian war. Did these two societies see themselves as rivals because each one was working for its specific nation, or as partners working to a common end and helping each other in achieving that aim? At the beginning of the 1870s, was the brotherhood of science stronger than national interests? This chapter will first demonstrate how the two societies interacted with a scientific community which attempted to locate itself above nations. That was part of the idealised discourse of a geographical society: science was seen as being a stranger to boundaries, in the Enlightenment and internationalist spirit. The prizes given to explorers by each society will then be studied: it will be seen that it was an honour for them to celebrate somebody from a different nation. The chapter will finally take two examples of British maps which were translated by the French to see how these interactions operated on the cartographic level. The French geographical society borrowed from the British one, whereas the British society did not owe a debt to its French counterpart. The argument of this chapter is that, at the beginning of the 1870s, producing scientific

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knowledge was a real concern for the two societies, for they both wanted to be regarded as scientific societies. However, that aim did not prevent underlying national rivalries being present, if understated.

A Scientific Network and Community: Above Nations? The French and the British geographical societies were scientific bodies belonging to a scientific network and a scientific community. But was science really above national interests? The Parisian geographical society was created in 1821 and was the first of its kind, acting as a model which inspired others: a role which it was very pleased to fulfil. In May 1872, Charles Maunoir, an active member of the French geographical society, declared that the society should feel proud of having paved the way for the twenty-five geographical societies which followed in every part of the world.11 The society was therefore described by its members as the first amongst equals, primus inter pares. In the same passage, Maunoir also asserted that the names of the explorers who had received prizes from the society clearly showed that the Parisian society had always located itself above national interests.12 That aim was already present in the declaration founding the society in 1821: a statement which was strongly inspired by the spirit of the Enlightenment, and which called for men of all nations to join a society which promoted the progress of geographical science and, therefore, civilisation.13 Science was thus the ideal of the French society at the time of its creation. The society was to be a forum for public debate beyond the boundaries of one nation because there was no equivalent in other nations. The absence of boundaries was also visible in the internationalist spirit which developed in the wake of the 1851 exhibition in London. The exhibition seems to have created a trend for international organisations, such as the Red Cross and the International Postal Union. The French society, being the first one, constituted a model. However, that model was quickly overtaken by the British society which, in turn, became a model for the French and other societies around the world. That irony did not escape the French, although—in the light of their defeat in the Franco-Prussian war—they were primarily concerned about having been overtaken by Germany in that field. 14 The Royal Geographical Society was created nine years after the French geographical society—in 1830—and its founding text contained slight differences, evidently due to Britain’s position in the world. It stated that a geographical society was “paramount to the welfare of a maritime nation like Great Britain with its numerous and extensive foreign possessions”. 15 Science was therefore explicitly linked to national interests. A strong connection was also drawn

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with the military. The role of army and naval officers in the society was emphasised. 16 Felix Driver has indeed remarked that army and naval officers constituted one-fifth of the 460 founding members of the Royal Geographical Society. 17 Was exploration pursued for imperialistic or scientific aims? Whatever the answer is, it was certainly seen as the duty of Britain to have a geographical society to gather knowledge that could be useful because of its role on the world stage. The two societies had common interests which make a comparison relevant and productive. The aim of both societies was to promote geographical knowledge by encouraging travellers’ explorations into unknown regions, organising conferences for them to present their work, and publishing their articles in their journals. They also collected books on geography and maps in their libraries. The two geographical societies were also both interested in dealing with the whole world, even if some of their own colonies were given more attention than they would have received otherwise. The British geographical journal at the beginning of the 1870s published more articles about India and Central Asia—mainly due to the British fear of Russian expansion. The French were also interested in Central Asia and published several articles from Russian journals on this region, but they also focused (much more than the British society) on North Africa because of the French colonization of Algeria. However, South America and Japan also figured along with other regions in both journals. The members of these societies were people from different backgrounds who were interested in global exploratory work: travellers, traders, and missionaries predominated. Many other professions were also represented. The military were significant in both societies, which was not surprising: they were often the men on the spot and had therefore more opportunity to conduct explorations; they had received a precise training in mapmaking; and they had the discipline necessary to deal effectively with extreme conditions. For all these reasons, their importance had been highlighted in the founding text of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830. The members had various aims which can be ascertained by looking at the maps presented in the journals of the two societies. What were the interests revealed to the reader in these maps? Science was a key aim. Maps with drawings of animals obviously belonged to the past. The world had to be recorded scientifically and measures of latitude, longitude, and altitude were highly valued, as well as the instruments that made them possible. The viewer might therefore expect to see maps which utilised scientific and apparently objective codes of representation, seemingly devoid of human subjectivity, maps with numbers and names only.

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However, maps shown in both journals still presented some comments from explorers on the areas surveyed. They added indications that could not be rendered in a satisfying way by cartographic symbols and, by so doing, they added a more personal and idiosyncratic element to the scientific maps which they produced. The maps reflected what the eye of an observer saw and the experience of passing through the landscape: they recorded the vegetation, the navigability of a river, and the absence, presence, and quality of water. These elements were useful for future explorations, for they indicated the practicability or otherwise of a route. The maps were about both locating and describing. For example, on a map of the Limpopo region in South-East Africa published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1872, some animals can still be seen—no longer as drawings, but in the inscriptions mentioning the presence of certain species (“Elephant, Rhinoceros & Buffalo”) which still had the power to make the reader dream (and have nightmares: the map also recorded the presence of a particularly harmful animal for Europeans, the “Tse-Tse fly”). Elephants, rhinoceros and buffalo were mentioned because of a British sport linked to adventure: hunting (the top of the map actually located the “headquarters of the elephant hunters”). Measurements and names of places were prominent on the map, but comments introduced by the traveller were still inserted. 18 These comments helped the viewer to fully visualise the landscape traversed by the traveller, indicating which features of the areas visited were worthy of record. Trade was another motive for map-making, as was shown by the maps presented in the journals of the two societies which recorded natural resources. A map of the Shantung region in China published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1870 locates the resources of this province, starting with gold.19 Several cartographic symbols are used to indicate where gold, cotton, galena, pongee silk, marble, lead, coal, copper, iron, mulberry trees, asbestos, white copper, precious stones could be found. That map was therefore intended to be useful to the businessman. The trade that Europeans and North Americans could carry out in China was an important issue at the time and the French society also produced a map of the agricultural resources of China.20 Exploring territories with a view to conquest was also a common focus of interest. A map of a region in Algeria located to the South and SouthWest of Géryville published in the French journal indicates the path of fifteen military expeditions (which also conducted surveys) from 1847 to 1870. The map shows that the boundary between Algeria and Morocco (represented as a bold line) was crossed many times by the light lines

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indicating the tracks of these French military explorers. 21 This map is evidence that mapping a colony was important, but it was also necessary to know what was on the other side of the boundary, especially if the neighbouring territory was believed to be fostering a climate of unrest in the colony. To control a colony involved exercising control over the other side of the boundary at the same time. The crossing of boundaries in exploratory work, linked to military expeditions, also meant that the boundary could be made to move. D. Graham Burnett has shown that explorers were taught to become boundary crossers and that in colonized countries, boundaries were not particularly fixed, but expandable.22 Forty years after this map was produced, Morocco became a French Protectorate. Maps were also made to aid settlement. A map for the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society by John Forrest, a government surveyor, showed which areas of the land of South-West Australia could be used for settlement by indicating that some areas were “beautifully grassed” or “grassy undulating country”.23 The idea of settlement was presented quite differently in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie in a map of the Dahra, a little known and therefore little colonized region in Algeria in the 1870s. 24 G. Bourdon, the military man who drew it, emphasized that villages and roads had to be created in order to gain military control of that area, and to balance the indigenous population by introducing European settlers. In his map he showed the existing villages and roads of the indigenous peoples, and also where new roads and villages should be created by the French, in order to be able to gain control over the territory. The new villages had to be built at a certain distance from one another on the new road so that communication between them could be easy, especially in times of unrest. In Algeria, French colonisers had to cope with a large native population; that was not the case in Australia. These different situations led to these two different sorts of map for the purpose of encouraging settlement. These maps were made to benefit national interests and—as they were published by the geographical society of a particular nation—they can be seen to be of relevance to that nation in particular. But they were accessible to the wider scientific community, and therefore the information presented could benefit other nations. Being scientific bodies, these societies exchanged the information they obtained. This exchange worked in two ways: scientifically, for it helped to know what was not left to discover, and nationally, for it emphasised that a specific society was to be congratulated for generating original knowledge. Each society received the journal of the other society and this enabled it to keep in touch with advances in geographical exploration and knowledge

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by the other nation. At the beginning of the 1870s, the French society recorded the deaths of the former president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick Murchison, 25 of the Scottish mapmaker Keith Johnston26—who belonged to both societies and several others—and of the British explorer Mr Hayward; 27 it was interested in all the news it could get from the famous missionary David Livingstone.28 Evidence of the fact that scientific journals circulated is shown by the number of French journals the Royal Geographical Society of London received from France: in 1871, for example, the British geographical society had access to the Journal of the Académie des Sciences de Dijon, the Annales Hydrographiques, the Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, the Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, the Journal de la Société Asiatique, the Rapport Annuel fait à la Société d’Ethnographie, and the Revue Maritime et Coloniale.29 Books were donated by their authors to the other nation’s society, and maps were circulated as well. For instance, the British geographical society received maps made by the French navy.30 This circulation of information took place within a wider context, and the interactions between the French and the British geographical societies are only examples among others: both societies exchanged with societies from many other countries. Two joint projects between members of the French and the British society are to be found in this period. One exploration was planned together—or so it seemed on the French side. A French explorer, Henri de Bizemont, was to meet Sir Samuel Baker in Africa. Similarly, erudite cooperation on Asia took place between H. Yule and Francis Garnier, who both belonged to the ranks of the military, the first one being a colonel and the second one a lieutenant. Finally, another interesting feature in those exchanges is the advice given by a British engineer in Morocco, James Craig, to the French in the journal of the French geographical society: the engineer advised the French to colonise Morocco as they would make good masters because of their experience in Algeria.31 Scientific cooperation was seen as key to these societies’ scientific reputations, and therefore rivalry was not often visible. It would not have been very diplomatic to criticise a nation, when the criticisms could easily be read by its citizens, because of the energetic circulation of the journals. But rivalry did sometimes surface in subtle forms, in maps for example. The key of a map of the New Hebrides published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1872 exposes a rivalry concerning scientific knowledge by underlining the presence of previous French—and also Spanish—explorers. In a metaleptic process—a process giving authority

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to the latest explorer by presenting and subsuming the authority of previous ones32—the British voyage is portrayed in red as the latest and the most complete one.33 The colours which are used to portray voyages by other nationalities are less prominent: French voyages are represented in blue and Spanish ones in green. It is the British voyage in red which will attract the eye first and which may end up being the only one that is remembered by the map reader. The same process was at work on general maps of the world on Mercator’s projection portraying the British Empire in red. The map reader after looking at the map would undoubtedly remember the areas where red patches were present. Colours had a special importance on maps, and the use of the colour red was a deictic procedure which guided the eyes of the reader to the area coloured red, and sometimes led him/her to ignore the context provided by the rest of the map. In the French geographical society’s journal, the same Francis Garnier, who paradoxically cooperated with the British Colonel Yule, used a map as a tool to make the French readers aware of British rivalry in south-east Asia. He wanted to show them the routes by which the British were planning to penetrate China from Burma in order to tap China’s resources—and to help the French readers realise that there could be a much shorter and convenient French route along the Tong King river to achieve the same end. The French route from Indo-China would benefit French commercial interests and compete with the British routes. Garnier here tried to sell the exploration of the Tong King to the French geographical society on commercial and patriotic grounds.34 From this survey of the aims of the British and French geographical societies at the beginning of the 1870s, it may be inferred that the two societies’ aim was to participate in the international scientific community, and to help in the progress of knowledge about the world. But these societies were also national societies and they welcomed speakers largely from their own nation, who would sometimes lecture with their nation’s interests at heart. There were therefore two levels on which these societies operated: an upper level which was scientific and internationalist in character, bypassing national boundaries, and a lower level which developed within national boundaries and which aimed at serving the interests of a specific nation. Was this a distinction between ideal and real geography? Geography could be seen as the study of the whole world without any preferences, but it was also the study of the world from one particular point of view which discovered knowledge related to one’s own interests. Geography and explorations were scientific endeavours which were both international (contributing to universal knowledge of the world) and national (producing knowledge that could be useful nationally): many

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articles presented in these journals belonged to both categories. For that reason, it is very difficult to distinguish purely scientific aims from nationalistic motivations, for they went hand in hand. It also explains why a French geographical society was soon not sufficient for all nations, for, despite its Enlightenment ethos, it also presented a French point of view on the geography of the world. Other nations needed their own geographical societies to see the world from their own point of view. And later, within nations, specific cities would need their geographical societies to speak to what interested them most.

It is an Honour for Us to Honour You: Medals for Geography After the general survey of the motives of these societies, a case-study of the prizes given by the two geographical societies reveals still more sharply the interplay between science and the nation. Did these societies give medals to explorers belonging to the other society or nation? They did—and examples of how they felt about this process will now be analysed. Giving medals to foreign explorers was a way of declaring that the society stood above nation, and that scientific interests were more important than national interests. In 1870, the Royal Geographical Society offered its patron’s medal to Francis Garnier, who has been mentioned above, for his expedition with Ernest Doudart de Lagrée from the French territory of Cochinchina along the Mekong river and through the heart of China, to the Yang-Tsze-Kiang, from 1866 to 1868. The expedition had made Francis Garnier famous in France where, as it has been seen in other examples, he was a significant figure in the French geographical society, but also in England, as the medal awarded to him demonstrates. Being offered a medal by the Royal Geographical Society in London was the highest reward an explorer— from any nation—could receive. On this occasion, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick I. Murchison, emphasized that a region in Indo-China which was almost unknown had been surveyed with great care by Garnier, and that France had “the fullest right to be proud of these doings of her gallant naval officers”, while “every English traveller and geographer rejoic[ed] in seeing” Garnier honoured with this medal. Murchison further suggested that Garnier should be rewarded by promotion to a higher rank in the French navy. Garnier answered Murchison in French—and the text is published in French in the British journal—with a polite speech saying that British travellers were present everywhere in unknown regions, and

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that the world belonged to those who studied and knew it best. He continued with a declaration that he felt jealous of the British need for expansion, and wished it was the same for the French, ending his speech by congratulating the British Geographical Society for its work.35 On the same day, Murchison offered the British society’s congratulations to De Lesseps for the Suez Canal, the construction of which shed honour on the whole French nation.36 In France, De Lesseps had been selected for a French national geographical prize: the short-lived Prix de l’Impératrice created in 1870, which had the aim of rewarding French people only,37 and which was set aside from the usual prizes given by the French society which could be awarded to people from other nations. At the award ceremony, a nice phrase (which could also be adapted to honouring explorers from other countries) was used: “There are men whom it is an honour to honour”. 38 By honouring respected explorers from another nation, a society showed that it could transcend national identities and act as a truly scientific body. At the beginning of the 1870s, the French geographical society in its turn honoured the British, but in a curious manner. For it chose to honour a pundit—an Indian used by the British to carry out surveys—employed by Major Montgomerie to explore Lhassa. Lhassa and Tibet in general were forbidden territories for the British at that time, and Major Montgomerie trained Indians in the techniques of surveying so that they could go into that these areas and bring back scientific measurements which would allow the British to map them. The French society gave the Indian the gold medal to make it clear that the French society was attentive to progress accomplished by people of any nationality. In addition, a map of the pundit’s route was published in the French geographical journal, therefore making indigenous work visible in the making of maps.39 The medal was, however, also a gesture of respect to the Indian’s superior, Major Montgomerie. Indeed, it was a classic example of how to kill two birds with one stone. 40 More conventionally, the French geographical society also awarded gold medals to two famous British explorers in Africa: David Livingstone in 1857 and Samuel Baker in 1867.41 Awarding medals to foreign explorers made sure that a society could claim to be a scientific society and that it did not operate on national grounds. Building a scientific community of geographers was important at the time, as part of the trend towards internationalism, and members from geographical societies from different nations started organising International Congresses of Geography, where they could all meet and discuss the uniform mapping of the world. During the first International Congress of Geography in Antwerp in 1871, the British explorer David Livingstone

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and the French explorer Francis Garnier were both awarded medals, along with explorers from other nations.42

British Maps Translated into French It has been demonstrated here that maps can be made to talk about the interests and rivalries of the two geographical societies, but that they can also reveal the exchanges between the two societies at the beginning of the 1870s. How were maps translated from one society and journal to another, from one language to another, and adapted in this process of translation to suit a particular audience and different aims, according to the journal? When studying interactions between the British and the French geographical societies, it seems that these interactions could also be seen on maps. In the early 1870s, translations of maps between the two geographical societies occurred on one side only: the French side. The British did report geographical news from France, but did not reproduce and translate maps published in the French geographical journal. But the French geographical society did, even if it was rare. This might be explained by the fact that the British geographical society, as the leading light in the world of exploration, only aimed at publishing original maps of exploration which were not to be found in the journals of other societies, whereas the French society thought that some of the maps published by the British geographical society would also be useful for French readers. This process of translation was used for a map representing the British Captain Musters’s exploration in Patagonia. In 1871, the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society published a rather detailed map of Patagonia to illustrate the route of Captain Musters from 1869 to 1870 and to accompany his paper which had been delivered on December, 13, 1870.43 In May 1872, a similar map appeared in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie to represent the exploration of Captain Musters.44 The French map was drawn from the English map and contained slight differences. It had been simplified and fewer names were shown, possibly because it was much smaller. Some indications had changed. “Inhabited by Wandering Tribes of Indians” and “Te-huel-che Northern People”, written on a large part of the English map, had become on the French map “Northern Tehuelche of mixed origin and Indians from the Pampas”. The indication “Table Hills” was no longer to be found on the French map which seemed to have replaced it much to the south by “Mountainous country”, which is absent from the British map. The French map also included information which was not on the British map: “Country with many salty lakes” and “Plenty of Game”. This shows that, like the translation of texts, the translation

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of maps is not a transparent process: Patagonia had somehow been partially lost in translation. The British map aimed at being exhaustive and presenting all the information that was known, whereas the French map was intended to be a summary of the previous map on one page, underlining the new elements that had been observed by Captain Musters and which were thought to be of particular interest. Another example of the interest of the French in British exploration was underlined by the map showing David Livingstone’s exploration which was published in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie in October 1872.45 This map was not a translation, for the British journal did not publish any map of Livingstone’s exploration at the time, probably expecting more precise information. It was therefore a French map written in French and compiled by Charles Maunoir from mainly British sources: “from Dr Livingstone’s letters to the Foreign Office, from Stanley’s narrations and maps by Clement Markham, Hassenstein, Keith Johnston, Petermann, Wakefield, etc”. The map was therefore drawn by compiling information and by combining British and German maps. The route of Livingstone and of Stanley is shown in red, being the most important element conveyed by the map, together with the lakes which are coloured blue. Blue was the colour used by the British geographical society in its scientific maps to portray the sea, rivers and lakes. There is an inset of a map of Africa to help the reader locate the region explored by Livingstone. The presence of that inset indicates that the map was not only intended for the reader with much knowledge on the geography of Africa, but for a broader audience. The names of previous British explorers are inscribed on the map (“Speke 1862” and “Speke 1858” on the Victoria Nyanza and “Baker 1864” on the Albert Nyanza), therefore emphasizing the romantic quest of British explorers searching for the sources of the Nile in the region of the Great Lakes. Some information is given as uncertain, as some areas had not been explored by Livingstone or the source is indigenous people’s reports gathered by Livingstone (“Unknown region” and “Lake with no name”). These gaps in knowledge, the blanks on the map, make exploration appear as a process which is not yet over: indeed, the readers of these geographical journals had to wait for a further eighteen years, and the two crossings of Africa by Henry M. Stanley along the Congo river, to obtain a better picture of the geography of that region. In the text which accompanied the map, a famous French explorer of North Africa, Henri Duveyrier, congratulated Livingstone on his exploration.46 The publication of this map in the French geographical journal was therefore a celebration of the exploration made by Livingstone.

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These two maps show that the French geographical journal kept a close watch on British exploration and wanted readers to visualize these expeditions through maps. The explorations of the Scot Livingstone in the region of the Great Lakes in Africa interested both British and French readers, who would have read about the rumours of the possible death of Livingstone; when he was known to be alive, they would have been anxious to get the latest information about his exploration. The map which was published by the French geographical society responded to the public demand to know more about this exploration.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to show that, thanks to the study of the exchanges between two geographical societies, it was possible to see the interactions between scientific interests and national interests in these institutions. Through use of published material (the journals of these geographical societies), this chapter has shown how the interactions between the British and the French geographical societies at the beginning of the 1870s were represented to the members of these geographical societies, illustrating the existing tensions between the production of knowledge for a scientific community composed of various nations and the localisation of the production of that knowledge in one specific nation. Scientific knowledge and knowledge produced by a particular nation cannot be separated. A British geographer summarised this tension at the beginnning of the twentieth century in a sentence which is a key to understanding the production of geographical knowledge. He declared that a geographer was both “a patriot and an internationalist”.47 The aim of a geographer is to understand the world, and in that he is an internationalist because he should be interested in all the regions of the world. But he also looks at the world from a particular point of view with a specific set of ideas given to him by his education and experience. He often uses geography in order to reflect on the question “where am I in the world?” and therefore also “what is the place of my country in the world?” No wonder, then, that the two interests of the geographer lie in the local or national and in the international. Those interests are interlinked and in tension rather than in straightforward opposition. Both levels—the local or national and the international—are to be understood by the use of comparisons between different countries. At the beginning of the 1870s, the pride in a nation, and the rivalry that may have been felt between one nation and others as a consequence of that pride, were incentives for the production of knowledge. Declaring that the

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interests of these societies lay above nations, and therefore giving their journals a scientific value, was one way of increasing the pride in a nation which was animated by such high scientific ideals. The scientific dynamism of a nation contributed to the influence of that country in the world. The fact that the Royal Geographical Society of London was perceived internationally as a touchstone in matters of exploration, a position which had been earned by the pursuit of science beyond national boundaries, contributed to the influence of Great Britain in the world. The French geographical society strove to imitate the British geographical society in order to achieve a similar result. But the French had lost much of their prestige after the Franco-Prussian war: they had to reassert themselves. It is, therefore, not surprising to see the British society giving a medal to Francis Garnier in a gesture that may well have been paternalist, and to note that the translation of maps worked on one side only: from the British to the French. Pride in a geographical society was associated with the pride of a nation at the end of the nineteenth century. Exchange of information took place to make one’s discoveries visible to others. The role of geographical journals was also to make other Westerners see one’s presence in the world. In this regard, nationalism and imperialism were linked in the pursuit of geographical knowledge by these geographical societies. In an article to be read by other nations in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, the British explorer R. B. Shaw declared in 1872 that Eastern Turkistan, in Central Asia, was a “conquest of the Royal Geographical Society”.48 And we might wonder to what extent geographical societies were conquering territories for their nations by geographical discoveries.

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Prix de La Roquette pour les Explorations dans le Nord”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 5th ser., 19 (Jan.-June 1870): 330-345. Driver, Felix. Geography Militant: Culture of Exploration and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Duveyrier, Henri. “Les Explorations de Livingstone dans la Région des Lacs de l’Afrique Orientale (1866-1872)”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 4 (Oct., 1872): 337-355. Elton, F. “Map of Route from the Tati Settlement to Delagoa Bay to Illustrate the Paper by Captain F. Elton”. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 42 (1872): facing 1. Forrest, John. “Map shewing the Overland Tracks from Perth to Eucla and Adelaïde”. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 41 (1871): facing 361. Garnier, Francis. “Carte Générale de l’Indo-Chine et de la Chine Méridionale dressée par Francis Garnier pour accompagner sa Notice sur les Nouvelles Routes Commerciales de la Chine”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 3 (Feb., 1872): facing 704. Hansen, J. “Carte de la Patagonie donnant l’Itinéraire du Capitaine Musters”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 2 (May 1872): facing 704. Harley, J.B. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2001. Heffernan, Michael. “The Science of Empire: The French Geographical Movement and the Forms of French Imperialism, 1870-1920”, in Geography and Empire, edited by Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith, 92-114. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994. Herbertson, A. J. “Geography in the University”. Scottish Geographical Magazine 18, no. 3 (1902): 124-132. Lejeune, Dominique. Les Sociétés de Géographie en France et l’Expansion Coloniale au XIXe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel, 1993. Markham, A. H. “The Solomon, New Hebrides and Santa Cruz Groups (South Pacific Ocean) to Illustrate the Cruise of the Rosario”. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 42 (1872): facing 213. Markham, J. “Sketch Map Showing the Mineral & Silk Districts of the Province of Shan-Tung (China) to Accompany the Paper by J. Markham”. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 40 (1870): facing 207. Maunoir, Charles. “Explorations de Livingstone dans la Région des Lacs de l’Afrique Orientale (1866-1872)”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 4 (Oct., 1872): facing 672.

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—. “Rapport sur les Travaux de la Société de Géographie et sur les Progrès des Sciences Géographiques pendant les Années 1870-1871”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 6th ser., 3 (Jan-June, 1872) : 481- 532. Murchison, Roderick I. “Address to the Royal Geographical Society, delivered at the Anniversary Meeting, May 23rd, 1870”. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 40 (1870): cxxxiii-cixxviii. Murchison, Roderick I. “Presentation of the Royal Awards (at the Anniversary Meeting, May 23rd, 1870)”. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 40 (1870): cxxiv-cxxxii. Musters, G. C. “Patagonia to Illustrate Captain Musters’ Route 18691870”. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 41 (1871): facing 59. Quatrefages, M. de. “Procès Verbal du 18 Novembre 1870”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 5th ser., 20 (July-Dec., 1870): 243-47. —. “Procès Verbal du 3 Novembre 1871”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 2 (July-Dec., 1871): 484-487. —. “Procès Verbal du 7 Juillet 1871”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 2 (July-Dec., 1871): 149-55. —. “Procès Verbal du 21 Juillet 1871”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 2 (July-Dec., 1871): 155-160. Shaw, R. B. “Presentation of the Royal and Other Awards (at the Anniversary Meeting, May 27th, 1872)”. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 42 (1872): cxxxv-cxlvii. Simon, G. Eugène. “Carte Agricole de la Chine”. Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 6th ser., 2 (Dec., 1871): facing 495. Surun, Isabelle. “Géographies de l’Exploration: la Carte, le Terrain et le Texte (Afrique Occidentale, 1780-1880)”. PhD thesis, University of Paris, 2003.

Notes 1

Samuel Prosper de Chasseloup-Laubat, “Allocution prononcée à l’Ouverture de l’Assemblée Générale du 23 Décembre 1871”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 3 (Jan.-June, 1872): 351. 2 Morag Bell, Robin Butlin and Michael Heffernan, “Geography and Imperialism, 1820-1940”, in Geography and Imperialism, 1820-1940, ed. Morag Bell, Robin Butlin and Michael Heffernan (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 6. 3 Michael Heffernan, “The Science of Empire: The French Geographical Movement and the Forms of French Imperialism, 1870-1920”, in Geography and Empire, ed. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 114.

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4 J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 57-58. 5 Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Makers: Land Surveying and the Colonization of New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001), 41, 47, 49, 62, 71, 76. 6 Hélène Blais, Voyages au Grand Océan: Géographie du Pacifique et Colonisation 1815-1845 (Paris: CTHS, 2005), 126; D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All they Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British Eldorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 93. 7 Isabelle Surun, “Géographies de l’Exploration: la Carte, le Terrain et le Texte (Afrique Occidentale, 1780-1880)” (PhD thesis, University of Paris, 2003), 15. 8 Blais, Voyages au Grand Océan, 222, 241, 310, 311. 9 Vincent Berdoulay, La Formation de l’Ecole Française de Géographie: 18701914 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1981); Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Culture of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 24-48; Dominique Lejeune, Les Sociétés de Géographie en France et l’Expansion Coloniale au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993). 10 Godlewska and Smith, Geography and Empire; Bell, Butlin and Heffernan, Geography and Imperialism, 1820-1940. 11 Charles Maunoir, “Rapport sur les Travaux de la Société de Géographie et sur les Progrès des Sciences Géographiques pendant les Années 1870-1871”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 6th ser., 3 (Jan-June, 1872) : 482. 12 Ibid. 13 “Projet du 19 Juillet 1821”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 1 (1822): 1-2. 14 Chasseloup-Laubat, “Allocution prononcée à l’Ouverture de l’Assemblée Générale du 23 Décembre 1871”, 352. 15 “The Royal Geographical Society”, The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 1 (1831): vii. 16 Ibid., viii. 17 Driver, Geography Militant, 41. 18 F. Elton, “Map of Route from the Tati Settlement to Delagoa Bay to Illustrate the Paper by Captain F. Elton”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 42 (1872): facing 1. 19 J. Markham, “Sketch Map Showing the Mineral & Silk Districts of the Province of Shan-Tung (China) to Accompany the Paper by J. Markham”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 40 (1870): facing 207. 20 G. Eugène Simon, “Carte Agricole de la Chine”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 6th ser., 2 (Dec., 1871): facing 495. 21 “Principaux Itinéraires Français au Sud et au Sud-Ouest de Géryville 18471870”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 6th ser., 4 (Sept., 1872) : facing 672. 22 Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, 10, 16. 23 John Forrest, “Map shewing the Overland Tracks from Perth to Eucla and Adelaïde”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 41 (1871): facing 361. 24 G. Bourdon, “Croquis du Dahra”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, series 6, vol. 3 (June, 1872), facing 704.

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Chapter Thirteen

M. de Quatrefages, “Procès Verbal du 3 Novembre 1871”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 2 (July-Dec., 1871): 484. 26 M. de Quatrefages, “Procès Verbal du 21 Juillet 1871”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 2 (July-Dec., 1871): 157. 27 M. de Quatrefages, “Procès Verbal du 18 Novembre 1870”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 5th ser., 20 (July-Dec., 1870): 244. 28 M. de Quatrefages, “Procès Verbal du 2 Juin 1871”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 2 (July-Dec., 1871):76; M. de Quatrefages, “Procès verbal du 7 Juillet 1871”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 2 (July—Dec., 1871): 149. 29 “Accessions to the Library”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 41 (1871): cviii. 30 “Report of the Council read at the Anniversary Meeting on the 22nd May”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 41 (1871): viii. 31 James Craig, “Un Aperçu du Maroc”, trans. Paul Voelkel, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 5th ser., 19 (Jan.-June 1870): 203. 32 Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed, 38-39. 33 A. H. Markham, “The Solomon, New Hebrides and Santa Cruz Groups (South Pacific Ocean) to Illustrate the Cruise of the Rosario”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 42 (1872): facing 213. 34 Francis Garnier, “Carte Générale de l’Indo-Chine et de la Chine Méridionale dressée par Francis Garnier pour accompagner sa Notice sur les Nouvelles Routes Commerciales de la Chine”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 3 (Feb., 1872): facing 704. 35 Roderick I. Murchison, “Presentation of the Royal Awards (at the Anniversary Meeting, May 23rd, 1870)”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 40 (1870): cxxiv, cxxviii—cxxx. 36 Roderick I. Murchison, “Address to the Royal Geographical Society, delivered at the Anniversary Meeting, May 23rd, 1870”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 40 (1870): clx. 37 Samuel Prosper de Chasseloup-Laubat, “Discours d’Ouverture de l’Assemblée Générale du 18 Février 1870”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 5th ser., 19 (Jan.-June 1870): 82-83. 38 V. A. Barbié du Bocage, “Rapport sur le Concours au Prix Annuel fondé par S. M. L’Impératrice pour la Découverte la plus Importante en Géographie ou le Travail le plus Utile, soit à la Diffusion des Sciences Géographiques, soit aux Relations Commerciales de la France”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 5th ser., 19 (Jan.-June 1870): 88. 39 “Voyages du Premier Pandit”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 5th ser., 19 (Jan.-June 1870): facing 512. 40 E. Cortambert, “Rapport sur le Concours au Prix Annuel pour la Découverte la plus Importante en Géographie et sur le Concours au Prix de La Roquette pour les Explorations dans le Nord”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 5th ser., 19 (Jan.-June 1870): 335.

Interactions between the French and the British Geographical Societies 265

41 “Liste des Voyageurs Etrangers qui ont obtenu la Grande Médaille de la Société”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 2 (July-Dec., 1871): 31. 42 M. D’Avezac, “Allocution à la Société de Géographie de Paris, à l’Ouverture de la Séance de Rentrée après les Vacances, le Vendredi 20 Octobre 1871”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 3 (Jan.-June 1872): 109. 43 G. C. Musters, “Patagonia to Illustrate Captain Musters’ Route 1869-1870”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 41 (1871): facing 59. 44 J. Hansen, “Carte de la Patagonie donnant l’Itinéraire du Capitaine Musters”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 2 (May 1872): facing 704. 45 Charles Maunoir, “Explorations de Livingstone dans la Région des Lacs de l’Afrique Orientale (1866-1872)”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 4 (Oct., 1872): facing 672. 46 Henri Duveyrier, “Les Explorations de Livingstone dans la Région des Lacs de l’Afrique Orientale (1866-1872)”, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 6th ser., 4 (Oct., 1872): 354. 47 A. J. Herbertson, “Geography in the University”, Scottish Geographical Magazine 18, no. 3 (1902): 131. 48 R. B. Shaw, “Presentation of the Royal and Other Awards (at the Anniversary Meeting, May 27th, 1872)”, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 42 (1872): cxl.

CONTRIBUTORS

Isabella Avila is a member of the Centre of Intercultural Research in English and French-speaking areas (CRIDAF) at the University of Paris 13, where she taught British history; she is now teaching British history at Paris IV-Sorbonne. She is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon. She did her PhD on “The Age of Maps: Cartography, Imperialism, and Nationalism in Great Britain and France, 1870-1914” at the University of Paris 13 and Salford University. She is interested in the representations of empires on maps published in school books, newspapers, atlases and geographical journals. She has also worked on cartographic representations of American imperialism from 1898 to 1917. Françoise Baillet is currently a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cergy-Pontoise where she has taught British civilisation, translation, and spoken English for several years. She is the author of a doctoral thesis on George du Maurier’s pictorial criticism of the Aesthetic Movement in Punch and has published articles on Victorian painters and black-andwhite artists (George Cruikshank, Frederic Leighton, and James McNeill Whistler). Her research interests include British fin-de-siècle painting, the Victorian press and the text-image interplay in illustrated literature. She is currently working on a project entitled “Visions and Divisions: Art and the Social Order in Nineteenth-Century Britain”, which will examine the role of painting and illustration in the maintaining of social, gender, and artistic borders in Victorian England. Marialuisa Bignami is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Milan. Her main research interests are in the field of English prose (the periodical press, the novel, and utopias). She is the author of the volumes Le Origini del Giornalismo in Inghilterra, Daniel Defoe: dal Saggio al Romanzo, Il Progetto e il Paradosso: Saggi sull’Utopia in Inghilterra. She is the editor of, among other publications, the volumes Epistemologies of the Novel (Textus-- English Studies in Italy, 2003), Le Trame della Conoscenza: Percorsi Epistemologici nella Prosa Inglese dalla Prima Modernità al Postmoderno (2007), and History and Narration (2011). To all three volumes she has contributed an essay herself. She is

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the author of several articles on John Milton, Daniel Defoe, George Eliot, Samuel Butler, Joseph Conrad, and Iris Murdoch. Odile Boucher-Rivalain is Professor of English Literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, in Paris. As a specialist on nineteenth century fiction, she has published articles on the critical reception of Victorian novels by Dickens, Collins, the Brontës, and George Eliot. She is the editor of an anthology of reviews published in Victorian periodicals on fiction and poetry, Roman et Poésie en Angleterre au XIXe Siècle: Extraits de la Presse Victorienne. (2001). Her research also covers Victorian architecture with articles on the Gothic revival in France and in England in the 1830s and 1840s, and on Ruskin and W.H. Leeds as architectural critics in the mid-nineteenth century. Zineb Bouizem is a PhD student at the University of Cergy-Pontoise in Paris; her dissertation is entitled “Monster or Hero? Dickens’s Criminal in a Selection of Writings from his Fiction and Journalism.” Her two unpublished master’s theses also deal with Dickens : “The Image of the Suffering Child in Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Great Expectations” and “Dickens’s Vision of the Prison in his Journalism and Two Novels: Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities.” She is also the author of two articles: “‘Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot’: la Représentation de la Ville dans Oliver Twist et Little Dorrit, Terre Promise ou Univers Carcéral?” published in Parcours Urbains, edited by Odile BoucherRivalain and Françoise Baillet (2010), and another paper studying the symbolic of fire in two Victorian novels: “L’Expression de l’Orthodoxie Victorienne à travers le Symbole du Feu dans Jane Eyre et A Tale of Two Cities,” in Le Feu, Symbole Identitaire, edited by Fabien Chartier and Kolawolé Elecho (2009). She has also been running her own business since 2009, “The Anglophile”, an agency specializing in English services (training, translation, and recordings mostly) for professionals in the Paris area. Di Drummond is Reader in Modern History at Leeds Trinity University, West Yorkshire. She has also lectured at the Universities of London and Birmingham and was a post-doctoral fellow at Royal Holloway College, London, and Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Crewe; Railway Town, Company and People, 18401914 (1995) and Tracing Your Railway Ancestors (2010), and contributed to The First Civic University: Birmingham, 1880-1980 (2000). Di has given papers on the cultural aspects of the nineteenth-century railway in

268

Contributors

the USA, India, and on the Continent. Recently published articles include ones on railways and British imperialism. Her current research considers the British promotion of railway tourism in India and Africa from the 1880s to 1950. She is working on a monograph entitled, Railways and the British Imperial Imagination, 1880-1950. Claire Huguet is a graduate of the University of Nanterre-Paris X, where she studied Philosophy and English and American Studies. She holds a degree in oral and written translation from the British Council in Paris, a Masters in Translation from Paris X and a Masters in American and English Literature from New York University; she also has a Masters in American Literature from the University of La Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, and she is currently working on a PhD on Ernest Hemingway. Her works aim at showing how the notion of nostalgia holds a central place in a definition of American Modernism. She is a member of La Sorbonne Nouvelle Research Group, Vortex, has just published an article on Ernest Hemingway’s exile in Paris in the 1920s, and has presented several papers in symposiums in France and in Britain. She works at the University of Cergy-Pontoise where she has been teaching translation, linguistics, British and American History, and American literature. Rosemary Mitchell is Reader in Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University, in West Yorkshire. She is the author of Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830-1870 (2000), and formerly worked as a research editor on The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), for which she has written nearly 150 articles. She has also published articles in The Journal of Victorian Culture, Clio, and Women’s History Review. She is currently working on a monograph on gender roles and domesticity in Victorian historical cultures, as well as a project on Victorian historical comedy. Her interest in the historical publications of C.M. Yonge is also reflected in an article in NineteenthCentury Contexts, published in Spring 2009 in an issue for which she was co-editor on “Reading the Past in Nineteenth-Century Britain”. She is Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, and Associate Editor for the Journal of Victorian Culture. Juliette Pochat is a Lecturer in British and Commonwealth Cultural Studies and History. She teaches in Classes Préparatoires in Paris. She is also a member of the Centre of Intercultural Research in English and French-speaking areas (CRIDAF) at the University of Paris 13. She specialises in the study of the British education system and has worked

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more specifically on such topics as illiteracy and elitism, but she also researches multiculturalism and education in England. She completed her PhD on the process of “marketisation” of the British education system in 2009. Karen Sayer is Professor of Social and Cultural History at Leeds Trinity University, in West Yorkshire; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she previously worked at the Universities of Luton, Portsmouth, and Sussex. She is the author of Country Cottages: A Cultural History (2000) and Women of the Fields: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth Century Rural Society (1995), and has published articles in Textile History and Victorian Literature and Culture. She is currently working on projects including material and technological aspects of livestock farming in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and women in Victorian farming. Her research focus is on social and cultural history in relation to conceptualizations of the rural, and concepts of the human and animal body in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has served as treasurer of the British Association for Victorian Studies and the Women’s History Network, of which she is currently establishing a new Yorkshire branch. Arkiya Touadi is currently working towards a Master’s degree at the University of Cergy-Pontoise in Paris, researching the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the image of an Indian woman, the Rani of Jhansi. This work includes graphic and cinematographic as well as poetic and literary representation. She is a member of the SARI and has written another article entitled “Regards sur une Reine Indienne” which will soon be published in a collection which she is co-editing under the working title Identités et Transversalités dans la Mondialisation. Nathan Uglow is Associate Principal Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University, West Yorkshire. He was a Junior Research Fellow at the British Academy (1998-2001), a post-doctoral position which he held at Reading University, where he studied the historical writings of Thomas Carlyle. He is author of The Historian’s Two Bodies (2001) and, most recently, the editor of Victorian Ethics (2008). In addition he has contributed around 50 articles (on the life and works of Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, and Sir Walter Scott) to The Literary Encyclopedia. A former classicist, his research interests centre on the relation of nineteenthcentury culture to that of ancient Greece and Rome. He is currently Assistant Director of the Leeds Centre of Victorian Studies.

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Contributors

Nathalie Vanfasse is Professor of English Literature at Aix-Marseille Université and a member of the LERMA research laboratory. She graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and holds a PhD from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. She is the author of Dickens entre Normes et Déviance (2007) and of articles and chapters on Dickens’s work and on nineteenth-century travel writing. She has also edited and co-edited volumes on Social Deviance in England and in France circa 1830-1900 (2005), the South in Anglo-American travel writing (L’Appel du Sud dans la Littérature de Voyage Anglophone, 2009), Cultural Transformations in the English Speaking World (2010), a special bicentenary issue of Les Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens entitled Dickens in the New Millennium as well as two special issues entitled Dickens Matters and Dickens His/story for the Dickens Quarterly (2012). She is currently co-editing a volume on Provence in the British Imagination and a book on Dickens, Modernism and Modernity.

INDEX A Quoi Tient La Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons?(Demolins) 47 Aberdeen, 4th Earl of 3 abstraction 15, 203–4 Académie des Beaux Arts 237 Académie des Sciences 43 Académie Française 91 Acomb, Frances 2 Adas, Michael 59 The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (Cuthbert/Bradley) 50 Africa 91, 205, 245, 246, 249, 255, 257–8 Age of Reason 219 agriculture 73–4, 77 The Allotment Garden (Clausen) 76 Almayer's Folly (Conrad) 10, 92 "Alpine Idyll" (Hemingway) 203 Angelus (Millet) 76 Anglo-French Attitudes (ed. Charle, Vincent, Winter) 18 Anglo-French Reminiscences (Betham-Edwards) 77 Les Annales Archéologiques (journal) 17, 233, 237, 238, 239 Apollinaire, Guillaume 193 Archaeologica Cambrensis (journal) 239 The Archaeological Journal (journal) 239 L'Archéologie en Angleterre (Didron) 239 architecture 16–17, 233–40 Aristotle 135 The Armourer's 'Prentices (Yonge) 151 Arnold, Matthew 7, 8 Arouet , François-Marie (Voltaire) 130 Art and Illusion (Gombrich) 34

Art Journal (journal) 28, 29, 31, 34, 36, 37 Augustine of Hippo, Saint 165, 167 Avignon 11, 104, 108, 109, 113, 115 Baker, Sir Samuel 252, 255 Ball, Charles 181, 182, 185 Barry, Charles 235 Bastien-Lepage, Jules 75, 76 Batchelor, John 94 Baudelaire, Charles 193 The Bay of Marseilles, Seen from L'Estaque (Cézanne) 200, 203 Beccaria, Cesare 221 The Bend in the River (La Route Tournante) (Cézanne) 201, 206 Bennet, Léon 185 Bentham, Jeremy 220, 224, 225 Bermingham, Ann 78 Bernard, Émile 204 Betham-Edwards, Matilda 9, 72, 77, 79, 81 "Between the Madman and the Savage: Scientific Theories on the Criminal, 1850-1914" (Davie) 221 The Bible 37 "Big Two-Hearted River" (Hemingway) 196, 198, 200, 204, 205 Bildungsroman 133, 134–7, 143 Billingsgate-Early Morning (Doré) 32 biography, as genre 58 Bizemont, Henri de 252 Black, Jeremy 2 Blais, Hélène 246 Bleak House (Dickens) 110, 117, 127, 128 the body 15, 16, 215–21 Bonaparte, Emperor Napoléon III 2, 48

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Index

Bonheur, Rosa 75, 77, 78 Bonington, R.P. 9 A Book of Golden Deeds (Yonge) 159, 168 Bossuet, Jacque-Benigné 13, 160 Boundary Makers: Land Surveying and the Colonialization of New Zealand (Byrnes) 246 Bourbon, Henri de 124 Bourdieu, Pierre 37 Bourdon, G. 251 Bradley, Edward (Bede Cuthbert) 50 Brancusi, Constantin 204 Brassey, Thomas 8, 9, 55–9, 61–6 Brest 95 Brettell, Caroline 72, 78, 81 Bridges, David 42 British Geographical Society 255 British Slavery (Gillray) 1 Brittany 73, 75, 80, 91, 94, 95 Brown, David 3 Brueghel, Pieter the elder 204 The Builder (journal) 240 Bulletin de la Société de Géographie (journal) 247, 251, 256, 257 The Bull's-Eye (Doré) 29 Burnett, D. Graham 246, 251 Byrnes, Giselle 246 Calais Gate (Hogarth) 115 Carlyle, James (father of Thomas) 141 Carlyle, Thomas 122–43 The French Revolution 129 On Heroism and Hero Worship 132 The History of Frederick II of Prussia 12, 129, 131, 136, 138, 140, 143 Latter-Day Pamphlets 125 Oliver Cromwell's Life and Letters 129 Reminiscences 129, 136, 140 Sartor Resartus 129 cartography 17–18, 246, 247, 249–53, 255, 256–8, 259

Cawnpore massacre 179, 181, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188 Cézanne, Paul 14–15, 192–207 The Bay of Marseilles, Seen from L'Estaque 200, 203 The Bend in the River (La Route Tournante) 201, 206 The Farmyard 201, 203 Mont Sainte-Victoire 194, 201 The Chaplet of Pearls (Yonge) 12, 150, 151, 152–8, 163, 164, 165, 172 Chappell, E. 235 Le Charivari (newspaper) 106 Charles I, King of England 13 Charles IX, King of France 153 Chasseloup-Laubat, Marquis Samuel Prosper de 245 A Chiswick Fete (Doré) 35 A City Thoroughfare (Doré) 32 Civil War, English 159 class 6–7, 9–10, 30, 33–4, 41–2, 46–7, 52, 235, 237 Clausen, George 75, 76 Coleridge, Christabel 150 Coligny, Admiral de 153 Colley, Linda 2 Collins, Philip 224 colonialism 14, 44, 56, 59, 179–88, 245, 249, 251 A Comedy about a Tragedy (Hugo) 217 Comité Historique des Arts et Monuments 237, 239 conceptualism 34–6 Conde, Prince of 165 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels) 33 Conrad, Joseph 10, 90–9 Heart of Darkness 93 Lord Jim 99 The Mirror of the Sea 93 The Nigger of the "Narcissus" 10, 96, 97 An Outcast of the Islands 98 "The Idiots" 10, 94 "Youth" 99

Mutual (In)Comprehensions Contemporary Review (journal) 73 Coubertin, Pierre de 7, 44 Counter-Reformation 123 Cragg, Gerald R. 164 Craig, James 252 Cries of London (Wheatley) 33 crime and punishment and the body 215–20 corporal punishment 212, 215, 217, 221 and the criminal 221–5 death penalty 15, 212–15 prison 16, 211–13, 217–26 transportation overseas 220 Crimean War 31 The Criminal Man (L'Uomo Delinquente) (Lombroso) 222 Crouzet, François 2 Cuthbert, Bede (Edward Bradley) 50 Dalhousie, Lord 181 Daly, César 16, 17, 233–40 Damiens, François Robert 217 Dante Alighieri 28 Darwin, Charles 222 Darwinism 221 Daumier, Honoré 106 Davie, Neil 221 Dei Delitti e Delle Pene (Beccaria) 221 Demolins, Edmond 47, 49 Dennis, Barbara 151 Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné (Hugo) 15, 211–13, 217–21 Devey, Joseph 55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67 Dickens, Charles 34, 138, 139, 211–26 Bleak House 110, 117, 127, 128 Dombey and Son 117 La Farfadet d’Avignon 115 Great Expectations 224 Little Dorrit 110 Oliver Twist 223 “Pet Prisoners” 224 Pictures from Italy 11, 104–17, 221

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A Tale of Two Cities 1, 6, 15, 16, 117, 211–26 "Dickens Abroad" (Parker) 117 Dickens and Crime (Collins) 224 Diderot, Denis 132–3, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 142 Didron, Napoléon 17, 233–40 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault) 217, 218 Disraeli, Benjamin 33, 44 Divine Comedy (Dante) 28 The Docks (Doré) 29 Dombey and Son (Dickens) 117 Donaldson, Thomas 237 Doré: A Realist and a Visionary (Kaenel) 28 Doré, Gustave The Bible 37 Billingsgate-Early Morning 32 The Bull's-Eye 29 A Chiswick Fete 35 A City Thoroughfare 32 The Docks 29 Hayboats on the Thames 29 A House of Refuge- In the Bath 35 Lambeth Gas Works 35 London: A Pilgrimage 5, 6, 28–38 Mixing The Malt 35 Paris As It Is 31 Resting on the Bridge 30 Roofless! 30 Thieves Gambling 35 Wentworth Street, Whitechapel 30 Driver, Felix 249 Duveyrier, Henri 257 Eagles, Robin 2 École des Beaux Arts 236 École Polytechnique 236 education, English class 6–7, 43, 46–7 sport 44–5 teaching as profession 42 Egley, W. M. 32 Elementary Education Act (1870) (Forster Act) 43

274 Elizabethan Settlement (1558) 152 Engels, Friedrich 33 Enlightenment 78, 123, 134–5, 138–9, 182, 212, 219, 247–8, 254 entente cordiale 1, 3, 14, 188, 240 family and English schools 45, 46 and the father 138–43 influences on Carlyle 132–7 "The Guises" 125–32 A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway) 195, 205 Le Farfadet d'Avignon (Dickens, trans Vidal) 115 The Farmyard (Cézanne) 201, 203 Ferry Acts (France, 1881, 1882) 43 Flint, Kate 105 folklore 10, 80, 81, 82 Ford, Caroline 77, 78 Ford, Ford Madox 91 Forrest, John 251 Forster Act (Elementary Education Act) (1870) 43 Foucault, Michel 15, 217, 218, 219 Fourier, Charles 233, 235 Francophilia in English Society, 1748-1815 (Eagles) 2 Franco-Prussian war 18, 42, 74, 245, 247, 248, 259 Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the Great) 12, 123, 129, 130, 131, 137–42 Freeman, E. A. 151 French Revolution and crime and punishment 219 and landscape painting 78 and Le Play movement 41 Pictures from Italy (Dickens) 109 The Release (Yonge) 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171 responses to 2 and secularisation 13 A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) 1, 15, 216, 216–217, 218 The French Revolution (Carlyle) 129

Index Frith, W. P. 32 Fronde, French 159, 162, 165 Fry, Roger 199 Gainsborough, Thomas 35 Gallicanism 13, 160, 164 Garnier, Francis 252, 253, 254, 256, 259 Gavarni, Paul 6 gender 14, 30, 74, 78, 151, 180, 183–7, 188 geographical societies 245–59 British 247, 248, 249, 254, 259 French 247, 248, 253, 255, 257 "geopolitics" 13 Germany 14, 43, 66, 136, 188, 248 Giedion, Siegfried 236 Gillray, James 1 Gladstone, William 183 "La Glaneuse" (Daumier) 106 Gleaners (Millet) 76 Godwin, George 240 Gombrich, Ernst 34, 35 Goodlad, Lauren M.E. 3 Gothic revival 16, 17, 240 Gothicism 11, 33, 109, 236, 237, 238 Gracq, Julien 183 Great Exhibition (1851) 17, 239, 248 Great Expectations (Dickens) 224 Grieder, Josephine 2 Grounds for Play: The Nauntanki Theatre of North India (Hansen) 184 Grousset, Paschal (André Laurie) 44, 45, 50, 52 “The Guises” (Carlyle) 122–43 and the family 125–6, 127 and the father 12, 138–43 influences on Carlyle 132–7 manuscript 123–4 Hagemann, Meyly Chin 195, 203 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert 29, 31 Handbook for Travellers in France (Murray) 105, 107, 108–9, 111, 113, 116

Mutual (In)Comprehensions Hansen, Kathryn 184 Harley, J. B. 246 The Harvesters (Brueghel) 204 Hayboats on the Thames (Doré) 29 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 93 Hegel, G. W. F. 141 Helps, Arthur 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67 Hemingway, Ernest 14–15, 192–207 "Alpine Idyll" 203 "Big Two-Hearted River" 196, 198, 200, 204, 205 A Farewell to Arms 195, 205 "Hills like White Elephants" 203 A Moveable Feast 194 In Our Time 195, 197, 199 “Indian Camp” 201 “Out of Season” 196 The Sun Also Rises 201, 203, 205 "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" 204, 205, 206 "Up in Michigan" 200 "White Whale" 205 Henri II, King of France 123 Henri IV, King of France 124 La Henriade (Voltaire) 130 heroism 56, 76, 135, 136, 141, 143, 168, 185 On Heroism and Hero Worship (Carlyle) 132 Heron, Patrick 196 Hervouet, Yves 91, 96 Higgs, Henry 9, 80, 81 "Hills like White Elephants" (Hemingway) 203 historical novels 150–73, 211–26 Dickens 1, 211–26 Hugo 211–26 Yonge 150–73 History of France (Yonge) 151, 153, 155, 156, 159, 164 The History of Frederick II of Prussia (Carlyle) 12, 129, 131, 136, 138, 140, 143 Hogarth, William 115 "A Homogenous Society? British

275

Internal Others, 1880 to the Present" (Tabili) 60 Holt, Emily Sarah 150 Holt, Richard 8 Hoock, Holger 3 A House of Refuge- In the Bath (Doré) 35 Household Words 224 Hughes, Thomas 45, 50 Hugo, Victor 16, 17, 211–26 A Comedy about a Tragedy 217 and death penalty 212–15 Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné 15, 211–26 Notre Dame de Paris 238 Idealism 12 identity, national 56, 58–60, 65, 79 "The Idiots" (Conrad) 10, 94 The Illustrated London News 31, 57 illustrations 28–37, 38 imperialism 2, 5, 17, 183, 246–7, 259 Impressionism 10, 76, 193, 197, 199 In Our Time (Hemingway) 195, 197, 199 L'Inde sans les Anglais (Loti) 91 India 13, 14, 64, 179–88 "Indian Camp" (Hemingway) 201 The Indian Mutiny-Giving a detailed Account of the Sepoy Insurrection in India, and a Concise History of the Great Military Events Which have Tended to Consolidate British Empire in Hindostan (Ball) 181 Indian Rebellion (1857) 13, 14, 179, 182, 183, 185, 187, 188 Inferno (Dante) 35 The Institution of Civil Engineers 57, 63 International Congress of Geography 255 “Irish Question” 10, 72, 79 James V, King of Scotland 124 Jansenism 13, 164, 165, 166, 167 Jerrold, Blanchard 6, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36

276

Index

Johnson, Maria Poggi 12, 151 Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (journal) 247, 250, 251, 256, 259 Journal Pour Rire 31 Kaenel, Philippe 28, 31 Kanpur (formerly Cawnpore) 179 Kazin, Alfred 193 "The King, the Priest and the Armorer: A Victorian Historical Fantasy of the Via Media" (Johnson) 151 Kitson, James 65 La Thangue, Henry Herbert 75 Lacoste, Francis 94 Lafitte, Charles 61 Lagrée, Ernest Doudart de 254 Lambeth Gas Works (Doré) 35 the land 72–82 in art 74–82 French and British agricultural systems 73–4 landscape 15, 91–2, 94, 107, 108, 111, 198–9, 200–6, 250 Landscape and Memory (Schama) 203 landscape painting 15, 74, 77–8, 88n43, 196, 197, 205–6 Latter-Day Pamphlets (Carlyle) 125 Laurie, André (Paschal Grousset) 44, 45, 50, 52 Le Play, Frédéric and mouvement leplaysien 6, 7, 41–52 Les Ouvriers Européens 43 La Réforme Sociale en France 43 Leeds 240 Leeds, William Henry 236 Lehning, James 79 Lesseps, Ferninand de 255 The Life and Times of Thomas Brassey (Helps) 57, 67 The Life of Joseph Locke, Civil Engineer, MP, FRS, Etc. Etc. (Devey) 57, 61, 62, 67 Little Dorrit (Dickens) 110

Lives of the Engineers (Smiles) 8, 58 Livingstone, David 245, 252, 255, 257 Locke, Joseph 8, 9, 55–6, 58–9, 61–3, 65–6 Loi Falloux (1850) 43 Lombroso, Cesare 222, 223 London: A Pilgrimage (Doré and Jerrold ) 5, 6, 28–37, 38 London 6, 28–37, 38, 76, 235, 237 London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew) 33, 221 Lord Jim (Conrad) 99 Loti, Pierre (Julien Viaud) 90–9 Le Mariage de Loti 10, 92 L'Inde sans les Anglais 91 Matelot 10, 90, 93, 96–7, 99 Mon Frère Yves 10, 95, 96 Pêcheur d'Islande 10, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97 Louis XIV, King of France 165 Louis XV, King of France 217 Lucy, Alice Fairfax 150, 173 Lyons 108 Macaulay, T.B. 6 Machines as the Measures of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Adas) 59 Macleod, Dianne S. 76 Macquoid, Katherine 80, 81 La Maison à Vapeur (Verne) 13, 179, 183–7 The Mall at St James's Park (Gainsborough) 35 Mangan, J.A. 7 Mariage de Loti (Loti) 10, 92 marine fiction 90–9 Marseilles 106, 109, 110–12 Marx, Karl 183 Matelot (Loti) 10, 90, 93, 96–7, 99 Maunoir, Charles 248, 257 Maupassant, Guy de 94 Mayhew, Henry 33, 221, 222, 223 McConkey, Kenneth 75 Medici, Catherine de 123, 156

Mutual (In)Comprehensions Millet, Jean François 10, 76, 77, 78 Milton, John 169 The Mirror of the Sea (Conrad) 93 Mixing The Malt (Doré) 35 modernism 11, 193, 198 Mon Frère Yves (Loti) 10, 95, 96 Mont Sainte-Victoire (Cézanne) 194, 201 moral unity 122, 123, 126 Morton, Henry 245 motif 205–6 A Moveable Feast (Hemingway) 194 Murchison, Sir Roderick I. 254, 255 Murphy, Richard 201, 203 Murray, John 11, 105, 107, 108–9, 111, 112, 116 Musters, Captain G. C. 256, 257 Nana Sahib 14, 179–82, 185, 186–7, 188 Napoleon and the British (Semmel) 2 Napoléon III, Emperor (Napoléon Bonaparte) 48 Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (Black) 2 New English Art Club 75 Newman, Gerald 2 Nice 112, 113 Nietzsche, Friedrich 211, 216, 217, 222 The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (Conrad) 10, 96, 97 Nochlin, Linda 78 Notes sur l'Angleterre (Taine) 46 Notre Dame de Paris (Hugo) 238 "Nouvelle Architecture à l'Usage des Prolétaires Anglais" (Daly) 237 Nye, J. V. C. 2 Oliver Cromwell’s Life and Letters (Carlyle) 129 Oliver Twist (Dickens) 223 "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, 1655" (Milton) 169 On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 222

277

On Work and Wages (Brassey) 58, 65 “other” 8–9, 14, 17, 37, 57–60, 62, 65, 67, 180 "The Other Miss Yonge" (Lucy) 150 "Out of Season" (Hemingway) 196 An Outcast of the Islands (Conrad) 98 Owen, Robert 234 Oxford Movement (Tractarianism) 12, 151 Parallel History of France and England (Yonge) 151, 159 Paris, Treaty of (1815) 180, 182 Paris 14, 74, 105, 106, 192, 213, 237 Paris As It Is (Doré) 31 Parker, David 117 Paul, Vincent de 13, 161, 162 Payne, Christiana 75, 76 Peasant and French (Lehning) 79 "Peasant Proprietors in France" (Verney) 73, 81 Pêcheur d'Islande (Loti) 10, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97 Peel, Sir Robert 3 La Père de Famille (Diderot) 132, 134, 137 A Personal Remembrance (Ford) 91 "Pet Prisoners" (Dickens) 224 La Phalange (journal) 234 Philipon, Charles 31 Philipp, M. J. (Arnold) 7, 48, 49 Philippoteaux, P. D. 45, 46, 51figs Phiz 114 Plimpton, George 194, 196, 202, 205 Pointon, Marcia 9, 36, 74 Pound, Ezra 194 Provence 109, 110 Prussia 139, 140, 142 Pugin, A.W.N. 16, 235 La Question Ouvrière en Angleterre (de Rousiers) 44 race and Demolins 47 “other” 8–9, 55–67

278

Index

stereotypes 56, 104, 112, 114–16, 117 railways and colonialism 13, 180 construction and race 8, 55–67 tourism 75 RASE (Royal Agricultural Society of England) 73, 79 realism 6, 34, 78, 198, 200–3 La Réforme Sociale (journal) 44, 48 The Release (Yonge) 13, 150, 165–72, 173 religion in Carlyle 123–4 in Dickens 11, 109, 113–14 and “other” 60 In Yonge 12–13, 150–73 Rembrandt van Rijn 35 Reminiscences (Carlyle) 129, 136, 140 Renaissance 126, 127–8, 129, 138 Resting on the Bridge (Doré) 30 "Résumé du Voyage d'un Architecte en Angleterre" (Daly) 235 The Return from the Fields (Boy and Man) (Clausen) 76 Revue Générale de l'Architecture et des Travaux Publics (journal) 16, 233, 234, 235, 240 Rew, Henry 80 Roche, Louis 114 Romanticism 2, 6, 12, 10, 36, 123, 134–5, 140, 142 Roodenberg, Herman 75 Roofless! (Doré) 30 Roosevelt, Blanche 29, 33, 34 Ross, Lilian 193 Rouen 55, 56, 66, 67 Rousiers, Paul de 44 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 78 La Route Tournante (The Bend in the River) (Cézanne) 201, 206 Rowell, Geoffrey 161 Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) 73, 79 Royal Geographical Society of London 247, 248, 249, 254, 259

Royal Institute of British Architects 234 Ruskin, John 127, 135 Saboya, Marc 235, 238 Sainte Croix, L. R. de 36 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle) 129 Savoy, Duke of 169 Schama, Simon 203 science 36–7, 234, 236, 238, 242n1, 245, 246–9, 254, 259 Second Reform Act (1867) 42 Segalen, Martine 74 The Select Committee on Railway Labourers (1846) 57, 66 Semmel, Stuart 2 sentimentalism 12, 132–3, 134, 136, 137 Shaw, R. B. 259 Shelford, Sir Frederic 64 Smiles, Samuel 8, 58 "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (Hemingway) 204, 205, 206 social realism 6, 31–3, 76 Société de Géographie of Paris 247, 248, 253, 255, 257 Société Internationale des Études Pratiques d'Économie Sociale 43, 44 "Solidarity between Science and Art" (Daly) 236 Space, Time, Architecture (Giedion) 236 St Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572) 12, 13, 153, 154, 158 Stanley, Henry M. 257 Stein, Gertrude 193, 194 Stephenson, George 58 Stephenson, Robert 58 Stone, Marcus 106, 114 The Stones of Venice (Ruskin) 127 Strasbourg 113 Stray Pearls (Yonge) 13, 150, 159–65, 167, 172 Studies on Modern Architecture (Leeds) 236

Mutual (In)Comprehensions

279

The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway) 201, 203, 205 Surun, Isabelle 246 Swayne, G.C. 29 Sybil (Disraeli) 33

Vincent de Paul, Saint 159, 161, 162 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 17, 236, 238 Viviès, Jean 116 Vollard, Ambroise 193 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 130

Tabili, Laura 60 Taine, Hippolyte 7, 44, 46, 50 Tarr, Rodger L. 122, 130, 131, 143 The Terror (La Terreur) (1792) 168, 217 Thieves Gambling (Doré) 35 Thirty Years War 161 Thomson, James Bruce 222 Through Brittany (Macquoid) 81 To What Do the French Owe Their Superiority Over the Anglo-Saxons? (Philipp) 48 Tom Brown at Oxford (Hughes) 50 Tom Brown's Schooldays (Hughes) 45 Tractarianism (Oxford Movement) 12, 151 Tracts for the Times 172 travel writing 11, 77, 78, 80, 91 Travels in France (Young) 72, 79 Trumble, Alfred 221 Tutein, D.W. 91, 96

Walton, Susan 150, 151 Wars of Religion 13 Waters, Catherine 127, 128 Watts, Emily 195, 201 Weale, John 234 Wentworth Street, Whitechapel (Doré) 30 "White Whale" (Hemingway) 205 Williams, William Carlos 193 Wilmer, Franke 59 Wilson, Edmund 198 Wood, Christopher 75, 76 Woods, Alan 28, 29, 30, 37 The World of Cézanne: 1839-1906 (Murphy) 201, 203 Wright, Thomas 16, 235 Wyngaard, Amy 77, 78

Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 219 L'Uomo Delinquente (The Criminal Man) (Lombroso) 222 "Up in Michigan" (Hemingway) 200 Utilitarianism 220 Venice 127 Verne, Jules 13–14, 179–88 Verney, Lady Frances Parthenope 73, 79, 81 Viaud, Julien (Pierre Loti) 90–9 La Vie de Collège dans Tous Les Pays (Grousset/Laurie) 45, 50, 51

Yonge, Charlotte Mary 150–73 The Armourer's 'Prentices 151 A Book of Golden Deeds 159, 168 The Chaplet of Pearls 12, 150, 151, 152–8, 163, 164, 165, 172 History of France 151, 153, 155, 156, 159, 164 Parallel History of France and England 151, 159 The Release 13, 150, 165–72, 173 Stray Pearls 13, 150, 159–65, 167, 172 Young, Arthur 72, 73, 79 "Youth" (Conrad) 99 Yule, H. 252, 253 Zafran, Eric 29, 34 Zola, Émile 6