Reading the Victorian Novel 9781003844716, 9781032483085, 9781032483092, 9781003388401

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Reading the Victorian Novel

Reading the Victorian Novel is a clear and engaging introduction to Victorian fiction. In this book, Annette Federico invites readers to turn their attention to the bursting imaginations and formal inventiveness of Victorian novelists themselves. Five conventions prevailed in the building of a Victorian novel: serialization, multiple plots, detailed description, a range of characters, and narrative method. Each chapter is rich in examples of these practices and attentive to the historical and cultural contexts that shaped them, as well as to the responses and judgments of Victorian readers and contemporary scholars. Federico keeps the focus on the writer’s choices and the reader’s experience–​–​on the meeting of minds and imaginations against the backdrop of history. Reading the Victorian Novel is an appreciative and discerning guide for anyone with an interest in the resonant and vibrant worlds of nineteenth-​ century fiction. Annette Federico is Professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA. She is the author of five books including Engagements with Close Reading (Routledge, 2016) and Charles Dickens: But for you, dear stranger (2022). She is also the editor of two collections of critical essays, Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic After Thirty Years (2009) and My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice (2020).

Reading the Victorian Novel Annette Federico

Designed cover image: James Tissot, French (1836-​1902). Detail from October, 1877. Oil on canvas, 216.5 x 108.7 cm. The Montréal Museum of Fine Arts. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Annette Federico The right of Annette Federico to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​48308-​5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​48309-​2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​38840-​1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003388401 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of Figures

vi

Introduction: Patience and Passion

1

1 Seriality

9

2 Plots

31

3 Picturing

54

4 People

77

5 The Storytellers Acknowledgments Index

100 123 124

newgenprepdf

Figures

2.1 The Tree of Life by Ernst Haeckel, from The Evolution of Man, 1879 3.1 “Mr Venus Surrounded by the Trophies of His Art,” by Marcus Stone. Illustration for Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Chapter 7 4.1 “Obliquity of the eyebrows.” The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin, 1872 5.1 William Makepeace Thackeray, possible self-​portrait, Vanity Fair, Chapter 9

41 70 84 108

Introduction Patience and Passion

Most people associate the Victorian novel with moral earnestness, melodrama, and heft–​–​for very good reasons! There are particular historical, cultural, and intellectual movements and events that shaped the genre that dominated the period of Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837 to 1901. Context is indispensable in reading the Victorian novel. The better we understand what’s going on both formally and historically–​–​what the novel is building on and borrowing from, the traditions and conventions that inform it–​–​the more pleasure we’ll gain from our encounter. People follow a docent in an art museum or use an audio guide as they walk through an exhibit for this very reason. We want to have our own experience with any work of art, of course–​–​no one should be told what to like or have the meaning of any work reduced to a single critical judgment. But it helps to be educated about the world the work emerged from as we form our own appraisals, and to hear what other people have thought, noticed, and felt about it. Surrounding a work of art with too much context, though, runs the risk of reducing or diluting any one artist’s craftsmanship and creativity into little more than a cultural document, the end product in a series of historical determinants. I completely understand the modern reflex to find facts and contexts: going to Wikipedia or reading online critiques and reviews can be habit-​forming. Yet I’ve noticed something about this almost unconscious impulse to look things up beforehand. When I go to a movie or read a novel after I have found a lot of information about it and have taken in different points of view, my own encounter feels slightly colonized by those perspectives; they break my contact with the work itself. If you are someone who values your experiences with reading and with art, if those encounters are morally, emotionally, or politically an important part of the person you are trying to become, finding a balance between fact and feeling can be a fine line to walk. I ask myself all the time how much research I should do before I read a novel by an author I don’t know, or go to an art exhibit, or listen to a jazz recording, or watch a film. How much do I need to know to get what’s going on? How will what’s already known before I read, listen, or watch affect my private experience? DOI: 10.4324/9781003388401-1

2  Introduction These types of questions have been on the front of my mind in writing this book about reading the Victorian novel–​–​a genre I really love, and that I want you to love. Historical contexts find their way into all of the chapters that follow, of course. But my goal has not been to reinform you about facts that are easily found on the Internet and in many scholarly books on nineteenth-​century fiction. Instead, I’ve wanted to put you in touch with some of the formal details of Victorian novels–​–​with the rhythm and pace of sentences, the movement of thought, the voices and pictures that characterize this literary genre–​–​and also with individual authors and texts. This has been challenging, given the weight of these novels and our limited tolerance for long quotations. But I still think showing is better than telling and that the best way to understand what characterizes nineteenth-​century fiction is to sample as many different models as you can and, when possible, to examine the responses and judgments of readers and reviewers from the past and present. Throughout this book I have wanted to keep the focus on the writer’s choices and the reader’s experience, on the meeting of minds and imaginations against the backdrop of history. I hope my examples are accessible and understandable, and that they spark your interest in reading further afield–​–​I’ve done my best to avoid spoilers! Most of all, in writing this book I have wanted to emphasize the diversity and imaginative resourcefulness of Victorian authors, and to excite your curiosity. To this end, each chapter ends with a Spotlight section, in which I briefly discuss a specific novel or novelist to illustrate the subject of that chapter. Taken together, I hope these Spotlight sections display something of the originality and enchanting variety of Victorian fiction. Most novels in the nineteenth century were first published serially, in weekly or monthly instalments in magazines, often with accompanying illustrations, and then in a three-​ volume edition made available to consumers from lending libraries. This form of publication generated many of the conventions we associate with Victorian fiction: multiple plots and cliff-​ hangers, long descriptive passages, a large cast of characters, and a distinctive narrative voice. What Victorian writers do with these basic ingredients of the novel as a form make up the peculiar scaffolding of Victorian realism. They make the Victorian novel the thing it is: lengthy, suspenseful, detailed, populous, funny, poignant, moralistic. But it was a long century, and a prolific one. What we call for convenience “The Victorian Novel” is not a static, unchanging artefact of the past or a shelf of classics by a few heavy-​hitters. It is estimated that between 1837 and 1901, over 24,000 novels were published in the United Kingdom by more than 5,000 different authors. Given the fluidity and variety of the Victorian novel over almost a century, is it possible to make general claims about how we should read these novels in the twenty-​ first century? Is there a consistent way to experience literature from such a multifarious historical period that would do it justice? I think the answer depends on what it is you want to know about the Victorian novel, and what kind of reading experience you are looking for.

Introduction  3 If your concern is to understand Victorian Britain as the world’s first industrial capitalist society, you may want to study the novel as a reflection of the period’s political volatility and the stress of democratic reorganization. If you are interested in nineteenth-​century intellectual movements and religious controversies, the novel can teach you what it felt to be “wandering between two worlds,” as Matthew Arnold wrote, and how Darwinian thought influenced the very structure of mid-​Victorian fiction.1 If you are a feminist or a student of social justice movements and want to comprehend the roots of radical change in the modern world, the Victorian novel dramatizes memorably the earliest struggles of women and the working class for social and economic equality. If you are committed to environmental issues, new work in Victorian ecocriticism sheds light on how novelists responded to industrial waste and pollution, deforestation, and other environmental crises that would accelerate globally and at a speed beyond what most Victorians could ever imagine. If you are interested in psychology and trauma studies, the Victorian novel is the locus for piercing testimonies of human disintegration and defeat, as well as to resilience and recovery, decades before Freud’s psychoanalytic theories took hold. If you are fascinated by philosophy and the history of ideas, or if you are just a wisdom seeker who gravitates to the classics, Victorian fiction offers a wealth of illustrations in the ethics of care, and the always relevant tensions between the freedom to choose and the limits of human agency. The representation of different types of physical and mental disabilities in Victorian fiction has also become a major focus for some scholars–​–​there is even a website dedicated to archiving Victorian texts that address people with disabilities.2 In the digital humanities, Victorian fiction’s words, metaphors, things, places, and illustrations continue to be mapped, coded, sampled, and scrutinized in detail. And despite its reputation for prudery, the Victorian novel is very much there for you if you are interested in sexuality and representations of gender in literature, including queerness and resistance to rigid gender binaries. The field of race studies in Victorian scholarship is also gathering huge momentum. Critics have called for a widening of nineteenth-​century studies beyond the limiting geography of the British Isles, an “undisciplining” and “de-​colonizing” of approaches that have centered almost exclusively on white British writers and the racist and imperialist assumptions behind their works. Scholars have recently argued that entrenched critical practices and orientations must be altered to meet the requirements of a changing world. Indeed, introducing new ways of reading Victorian fiction can contribute to greater diversity in the canon and the curriculum. These scholars and teachers insist we acknowledge that racism is embedded in our aesthetic judgments–​–​including the assumption that the Victorian age is paramount in the history of the novel and that Victorian realist fiction is the “masterful” center against which non-​Western novels are measured, and found wanting.3 Just as European classical music, it has been argued, makes melody, harmony, and rhythm the “master” language to the exclusion of non-​Western

4  Introduction traditions, influential mid-​ twentieth-​ century literary critics whose tastes prioritized psychological realism, formal coherence, and moral seriousness placed nineteenth-​century British novels at the center of the tradition. The racial logic of that tradition is now being called into question. The scholar Elaine Freedgood has recently argued, quite persuasively, that to continue to talk about the Victorian novel as “great”–​–​great for its realism, its moral perceptiveness, its social analysis–​–​renders its underlying violence and racism acceptable or invisible. These critical directions offer exciting ways to open the Victorian novel to present issues and concerns, and readers of this book might wish to be aware of them, especially students who are formally engaged in literary studies. Incredibly diverse reading lenses have been applied to Victorian novels, both within and beyond the academic arena–​–​in the last decade or so, Victorian fiction seems to have been on the minds of quite a few filmmakers and producers of TV miniseries, for example. Since the publication of A. S. Byatt’s award-​winning novel, Possession, in 1990, there has also been a surge in neo-​Victorian fiction, modern novels that are set in the nineteenth-​century or creatively revise Victorian classics (Hadley 2). Many have since been adapted for television and film, as contemporary writers exploit Victorian tropes to comment on social and political concerns relevant to our own time. There are many reasons for someone to pick up David Copperfield or Jane Eyre or Barchester Towers, and I am reluctant to set down any rules or protocols. But at a minimum, I think it is safe to say that the Victorian novel asks of its readers two things. The first is to accept its artifice and walk inside the world the author has created–​–​the streets of London, a cathedral town, a drawing room, a haunted house–​–​without irony or condescension. As the critic J. Hillis Miller has noted, the imaginary realm opened by a literary work is not simply “made available” to the reader … Right reading is an active engagement. It requires a tacit decision to commit all one’s powers to bringing the work into existence as an imaginary space within oneself. In response to the novel’s invocation, says Miller, the reader must reply, “I promise to believe in you” (38). You should accept the particular world, people, and events in a Victorian novel as though they really exist or could have existed. That is the price of admission. The second requirement is to pay attention to your reactions, for make no mistake, the Victorian novel has designs upon your heart as well as your head. If you open a novel by Charles Dickens or Charlotte Brontë armed and ready for combat, if you read it too narrowly or judgmentally, I think you will be missing out. You will foreclose on the chance to know–​–​in that mysterious, implicit way we do know–​–​that a writer from the past has spoken directly to you. What I am urging is something like what the great Russian

Introduction  5 ex-​patriot Vladimir Nabokov advocated in the lectures he gave at Cornell and Wellesley in the 1950s (I’ll come back to Nabokov later). If you want advice on how to read nineteenth-​century literature, you cannot do better than get hold of his Lectures on Literature and read the short first chapter, called “Good Readers and Good Writers.” I read it when I was in college, and it remains the best and most succinct advice I know about how to read literature, especially nineteenth-​century European fiction: If one begins with a ready-​made generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. (1) Nabokov rightly observes that no one is able to read analytically in their first encounter with a novel. Our minds are too busy trying to understand what is going on and in figuring out how to respond to the writer’s voice. This is why, he says, “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-​reader” (3). And Victorian novels, with their profuseness, heterogeneity, and love of detail are fortunately eminently re-​readable! I always find something I never noticed before when I re-​read beloved novels like Dickens’s David Copperfield or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights after a few years have passed. Of course, re-​reading is part of my job as a teacher–​–​I am tempted to say it is the best part–​–​and I realize that not everyone has the luxury of time to re-​read long novels. That is why I recommend that in your first time around, you should just read. Read with curiosity and an open mind, with frank questions and honest susceptibility. You can always take up an analytical position or apply a specific critical or historical lens later if that is your ambition, after you have discussed the work and read what others have said about it–​–​and of course when you have had a chance to read it again. Nabokov offers another important piece of advice. We should approach the world of the novel, he says, with a temperament that combines warm intuition and cool observation, “an artist’s passion and a scientist’s patience” (5). Passion and patience: here is an excellent mantra for approaching the Victorian novel. Our attention spans are shrinking more every day and the distractions and temptations of digital and visual media are ubiquitous. Undertaking to read George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Dickens’s Our Mutual

6  Introduction Friend involves a commitment of time. It requires mental energy, focus, and imagination. I know highly educated people who have felt obliged to read these books because they are “masterpieces” and who have had to give up because of their busy lives. They let the thread drop, and when that happens it can be hard to pick up the story again with the same sense of commitment. Patience, then, is one key to reading Victorian fiction carefully and well–​–​ believe me, George Eliot is not in a hurry. But also, do not forget passion. Because if you want to have a worthwhile experience with a work of literature, you have to care. It’s that simple. Some understanding of the Victorian worldview and of Victorian people and their social roles can be useful when you undertake to read a work published almost two hundred years ago. A little knowledge of nineteenth-​ century British intellectual history, political movements, scientific discoveries, gender ideology, and artistic innovations also helps. But more than anything, reading the Victorian novel requires a questioning intelligence and an eye for detail, as well as some expectation of surprise and delight in what might be discovered. There is sometimes so much going on in a novel by writers such as Dickens or Wilkie Collins or Thackeray, you may feel you’re not getting all the references or that you’re missing important contexts. Do not worry. Stick with the story you do understand, watch the characters you care about (it’s helpful to underline names when a new person appears), register your reactions by making comments in the margins or taking short notes. Whip out your phone if you feel you need to know what a green baize door looked like or what a guinea was worth, or to nail down some Biblical or classical allusion (they are quite plentiful in Victorian novels). If you’re reading a scholarly edition, check out the footnotes. Or not! The most important thing is to keep reading even if you don’t understand everything. Once your imagination really and truly gets working, I can promise that you’ll be hooked. “The effort to begin a book,” Nabokov says, “especially if it is praised by people whom the young reader secretly deems to be too old-​fashioned or too serious, this effort is often difficult to make; but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant. Since the master artist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of the book should use his imagination too” (4). Sometimes we see our own time more keenly by stepping away from it. Or we find out something about ourselves by thinking about a character who never existed, at a time and place we’ve never seen. My goal in this book is to help you appreciate how Victorian novels work, how artistically sophisticated they can be, how interconnected they are with Victorian history and society, and how much pleasure they can offer you. Reading older literature that feels stylistically strange, uses challenging language, and takes a long time to get through exercises the mind and feelings in ways that can make people fidgety. You are forced to digest long sentences, to process layers of detail, to tolerate unfamiliar references and obsolete

Introduction  7 objects and weird social codes. Yet you also get to live with characters who grow and change over time. You feel with them and judge them and know them almost as well as you will ever know any real person in your life. You are also strengthening your vocabulary, learning something about western intellectual and literary culture, and getting news about a decisive period in modern history, of which we in the twenty-​first century are still very much the inheritors. I initially learned about Victorian novels just by reading some of them when I was in my teens and early twenties, very largely on my own, simply out of pleasure and curiosity. When I decided to make Victorian literature the focus of my studies in graduate school, I had to read more widely, more critically, and much more analytically. That type of professional reading has deepened and enhanced my experience with the Victorian novel. But I am happy to say that the feelings of pleasure and curiosity that first drew me to this period of literary study have not deserted me. I think what pulled me into the orbit of the Victorian novel was its layered and conscientious descriptions of modern people adapting to a changing world–​–​of the small or large conflicts of ordinary people, women especially, at a time in world history that seemed to me romantically distant yet quite recognizable. (I also like reading long books.) Victorian novelists undertook the urgent project of discovering how a person acquires a sense of an authentic self in a secular, competitive, and often meretricious society–​–​as the German sociologist Friedrich Engels wrote in 1845, the “isolation of the individual, this narrow self-​seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere” (37). Victorian novelists took upon themselves the task of reminding people that despite the pressures of this new social and economic system, pure self-​ sufficiency is impossible. Characters are often torn between their sense of their duty to others–​–​their families, their communities–​–​and what they need psychologically and emotionally to survive and to thrive. Moral questions about the individual, the marketplace, the family, marriage, vocation, scrupulous examination of people’s motives and ambitions, their self-​deceptions, frustrations, and regrets–​–​these situations and feelings are at the heart of almost all Victorian novels, embedded in even the most sensational or outlandish plots. The Victorian novel simply cannot shake off the world and its responsibilities. I like the Victorian novel for its moral fullness, its sureness, and its penetration to the fact of our inescapable interrelatedness. I also enjoy its self-​conscious artfulness and meta-​fictionality, wry and broad humor, and of course its long and winding sentences. Drawn as I am to psychology, I value the Victorian novel’s unrepressed dramatizations of characters’ inner struggles and the abiding concern with identity and self-​formation. If there is not a lot of explicit sex in nineteenth-​century fiction, there is a lot of everything else–​–​love and grief, jealousy and guilt, remorse, sacrifice, and joy. Those are some reasons why I am drawn to these literary works. My advice is to find what pulls you inside the world of whatever Victorian novel you have chosen or happen to be reading or are curious about. Then just

8  Introduction keep reading for that thing. The rewards will be, as Nabokov predicted, surprising and abundant. Notes 1 The line is from Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” (1855): “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, /​The other powerless to be born, /​With nowhere yet to rest my head, /​Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.” 2 See www.nine​teen​thce​ntur​ydis​abil​ity.org 3 See, for example, Chatterjee, Christoff, and Wong, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies.”

Works Cited Chatterjee, Ronjaunee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong. “Undisciplining Victorian Studies.” The Los Angeles Review of Books, July 10, 2020. Accessed at https://​lare​view​ofbo​oks.org/​arti​cle/​und​isci​plin​ing-​victor​ian-​stud​ies/​ Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009. Freedgood, Elaine. Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Princeton University Press, 2019. Hadley, Louisa. Neo-​Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Miller, J. Hillis. On Literature. Routledge, 2002. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980.

1 Seriality

Victorian novels tend to be longer than today’s bestsellers, and according to the non-​profit research group WordsRated, even those are getting shorter. The average length of a New York Times bestseller decreased by about 52 pages, almost 12%, from 2011 to 2021. Books over 400 pages seem to be disappearing altogether.1 Websites for aspiring writers estimate that the average novel today is about 80,000 words. The average word count for a novel by Charles Dickens, on the other hand, clocks in at about 357,000 words. So, when you sit down to read a Victorian novel, usually as a single volume, probably a paperback with a scholarly introduction and explanatory notes, it is a unique investment of your time. How should you tackle a long book from one hundred and fifty years ago? In the twenty-​first century, we set our own reading pace and even choose our preferred method of delivery: book, e-​book, audio book. You may plan to read for an hour, mark your place, go do something else, come back later, read for another hour. Or if you are like me in my student days, you can settle on the sofa at eight o’clock and read straight through to midnight, inhaling the book as though your life depended on it. But whatever mode you choose, to read or listen to a Victorian novel on a regular daily schedule–​–​it has to be daily–​–​will take about two and a half weeks or nineteen listening hours for medium-​long novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854) or Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), perhaps four weeks, or thirty-​seven hours of listening to get through fatter ones such as Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) or William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848). And if you are like my students, you will be reading or listening to those books with your eyes on the two little words standing stark against the horizon like goalposts: “The End.” The original consumers of those four, uniquely wonderful mid-​century novels would have had a very different reading and listening experience (and altogether different goalposts) due to three historical conditions that do not pertain today: the method of serializing novels in weekly or monthly installments in magazines; the dominance of the bulky, three-​volume format; and the unofficial censorship exercised by the lending library system. Between DOI: 10.4324/9781003388401-2

10  Seriality the 1830s and 1890s, these three cultural conventions, each dependent on a particular relationship to time and timing, produced a special narrative package. The ways Victorian novels were published and consumed shaped almost everything about them–​–​especially their size and complexity. For almost a century, the literary establishment thought the Victorian novel’s lengthiness, multiplicity, and intermittency were artistic flaws. The preference was for fiction that was compact and dramatic, “works with extremely tight structures, a limited simple plot, and a small cast of characters” (Stang 115). A little restraint, more showing and less telling, was preferred, and nineteenth-​century French novelists, Balzac and Flaubert, especially, were thought to be better at this kind of writing than their British counterparts. Many decades before Henry James’s famous delineation, in 1908, of Victorian novels as “large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary” (James 515), there were critics troubled by the direction the English novel seemed to be taking. It looked clunky and slapdash, the plots had too many tentacles, it lacked the unifying motif of French fiction. The influential Victorian critic George Henry Lewes, for example, believed novels should be more streamlined: the object of construction is to free the story from all superfluity. Whatever is superfluous—​whatever lies outside the real feeling and purpose of the work, either in incident, dialogue, description, or character, whatever may be omitted without in any degree lessening the effect—​is a defect in construction. (Stang 120) For the critic George Brimley, unity was the central critical question: “We estimate works of art … more by their unity and completeness than by their richness and profusion of raw material. It is coherence, order, purpose, which makes the difference between Nature and Chaos” (Stang 119). The critical interest was on the whole of the work, not its parts. Everything should be tied to the requirements of the action, what Aristotle called the praxis, rather than to a freewheeling assemblage of characters playing their various roles. Even novels we think of now as supremely well-​designed were sometimes judged incohesive when they first appeared. Readers who recognized and admired George Eliot’s tenderness and moral insight in The Mill on the Floss (1861) could still call the novel an “artistic failure” because it had “no defined channel of action.” “There is no single plot in The Mill on the Floss; it is a masterly fragment of fictitious biography” (Bagehot 214). Thackeray’s masterpiece, Vanity Fair, was faulted for being “rather a succession of connected scenes and characters than a well-​constructed story … Mr. Thackeray seems to have looked at life by bits rather than as a whole” (Tillotson and Hawes 58–​9). Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), one reviewer asserted, was a total mess, suffering an “absolute want of construction … fatal to continuous interest” (P. Collins 283).

Seriality  11 This particular reviewer’s response feels weirdly clueless, as everyone agrees now that Bleak House is a work of astounding coherence in both design and purpose. Yet this judgment goes to show how important a concise and well-​ built narrative was to Victorian critics trained in the Aristotelian creed of the dramatic unities of place, time, and action The quality of the action mattered, too. The story was to be noble, to be fine, to shed light on “the genial beauty and stormy greatness of human nature,” as in classical drama (Stang 126). A novel is not just one startling incident after another, a series of odd or humorous escapades devised simply to keep the reader hooked and happy. That kind of catchpenny, episodic writing, some Victorian critics argued, has no sense of dramatic proportion. This view reflects the widespread feeling in the early years of the nineteenth century that the novel was a second-​rate art form, well below the aesthetic and moral demands of poetry and the drama. It was even somewhat vulgar, the product of spurious would-​be authors, and aimed at people with superficial or “lowbrow” tastes—​in other words, for the very large mass of ordinary humanity, those citizens who were just stepping up on the lowest rung of the ladder of social advancement at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and whose greatest wish was to be comfortably and cheaply amused. And people were amused, they were greatly amused. Despite the reservations of Victorian reviewers, novels were so popular among all social classes that by the middle of the century supply could barely keep up with demand. What was going on? Were writers catering to the lowest common denominator in order to make money? Was the public taste being utterly degraded by this form of entertainment? To some cultural arbiters, the issue was not just the novel itself but the demands of the literary marketplace and the transformation of books into commodities. Fingers pointed sharply at the newfangled method of weekly or monthly serializations of novels in magazines. As one reviewer put it, in 1851, The serial tale … is probably the lowest artistic form yet invented; that, namely, which affords the greatest excuse for unlimited departures from dignity, propriety, consistency, completeness, and proportion. In it, wealth is too often wasted in reckless and riotous profusion, and poverty is concealed by mere superficial variety, caricature, violence, and confused bustle. Nine-​tenths of its readers will never look at it or think of it as a whole … No fault will be found with the introduction of any character or any incident however extravagant or irrelevant, if it will amuse for an hour the lounger in the coffee-​room or the traveller by railway. With whatever success men of genius may be able to turn this form to their highest purposes, they cannot make it a high form of art, nor can their works in that kind ever stand in the first class of the products of the imagination.

12  Seriality For this reviewer, the faults of the novel under review–​–​and yes, he is talking about the great David Copperfield (1850)–​–​are due to the constraints of the serial method, and not necessarily with Dickens himself. Indeed, this author generously conceded that “David Copperfield is a signal triumph over the disadvantages of a bad form” (P. Collins 264–​5). Reviewers complained about the limitations of serialization, yet considerable skill and intelligence is involved in composing a novel in weekly or monthly parts. It requires both mental discipline and an intuitive sense for how a long narrative should be shaped. In the last twenty years, literary scholars have been able to use digital tools to better understand the decisions made by serial writers. They’ve noted that the crucial revelation tends to occur at midpoint in the serial, and that there are more references to the predicted future in serial fiction than in stand-​alone volumes. Scholars have measured the time between when characters are taken offstage and when they reappear, and studied the subtle effects of alternating “dark” moods (horror, suspense, pathos) and “light” moods (comedy, satire, humor).2 In Oliver Twist (1837), Dickens called this the “streaky bacon” method, where the story transitions from “well-​ spread boards to death-​ beds, and from mourning-​ weeds to holiday garments.” These “sudden shiftings of the scene, and rapid changes of time and place, are not only sanctioned in books by long usage, but are by many considered as the great art of authorship: an author’s skill in his craft being … chiefly estimated with relation to the dilemmas in which he leaves his characters at the end of every chapter” (134). Thus, the most obvious literary device brought on by serialization was the cliff-​hanger, which, as one astute writer predicted in 1861, would change the very form of the novel: We cannot say that we have ever met with a man who would confess to having read a tale regularly month by month, and who, if asked how he liked Dickens’s or Thackeray’s last number, did not instantly insist upon the impossibility of his getting through a story piecemeal. Nevertheless, the monthly publication succeeds, and thousands of a novel are sold in minute doses, where only hundreds would have been disposed of in the lump… . On the whole, perhaps, the periodical publication of the novel has been of use to it, and has forced English writers to develop a plot and work up the incidents. Lingering over the delineation of character and of manners, our novelists began to lose sight of the story and to avoid action. Periodical publication compelled them to a different course. They could not afford, like Scheherazade, to let the devourers of their tales go to sleep at the end of a chapter. As modern stories are intended not to set people to sleep, but to keep them awake, instead of the narrative breaking down into a soporific dulness, it was necessary that it should rise at the close into startling incident. Hence a disposition to wind up every month with a melodramatic surprise that awakens curiosity in the succeeding number. (P. Collins 431)

Seriality  13 The timing of serialization–​–​the need to keep the reader awake and interested by punctuating each installment with suspense and surprise–​ –​ was now driving the art of the novel. And as I have already alluded, some Victorian literary critics were worried that this concern with keeping the reader’s pulse throbbing would eventually corrupt the so-​called “aesthetic purity” of this developing genre. There were writers, though, who relished writing for serial publication. They had a knack for it. Dickens felt he enjoyed a more intimate relationship with his readers through this method of composition. His Prefaces to the three-​volume editions that succeeded the serial often express mixed feelings about parting from his readers after so long a time together. The Prefaces to both Bleak House and Little Dorrit (1857) end with the words, “May we meet again!” Yet we know from his letters to John Forster that Dickens sometimes struggled to meet the required number of “slips” for each installment. The first number of Dombey and Son was written at the end of July 1847, while Dickens was traveling abroad. By the end of August, he confessed to Forster, “You can hardly imagine what infinite pains I take, or what extraordinary difficulty I find in getting on fast. … the difficulty of going at what I call a rapid pace, is prodigious; it is almost an impossibility” (Forster 281). Serial publication required tight deadlines. Writing on the fly meant novelists could not carefully revise their work. Often, they were under pressure to put something exciting in every installment in order to keep readers buying papers. George Eliot published four successful novels as serials, but the process was an ordeal for her, and she longed to be spared what she called “the Nightmare of the Serial” (Martin 116). Anthony Trollope’s method was to glue himself to his chair for three hours every day. All those I think who have lived as literary men,—​working daily as literary labourers,—​will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write…. It still is my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient to myself,—​to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went. (248–​9) The clock was always ticking for Victorian novelists, as well as for Victorian readers. As editor of his own magazines, Dickens often had to coach less experienced writers on how to produce a good serial. A well-​known case was the weekly serialization of Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial novel, North and South, in Dickens’s Household Words in 1854–​55. After reading through a portion of Gaskell’s manuscript, Dickens had some advice about how to reshape it for its serialization in weekly numbers. “[L]‌et me endeavour to shew you as distinctly as I can, the divisions into which it must fall,” Dickens wrote, and

14  Seriality then proceeded to suggest to the author how each of the first six numbers should end (Selected Letters 277). Gaskell was not altogether pleased. There were other problems with North and South. The printer miscalculated the amount of space available, and Gaskell had to change her story to fit the number of columns allotted to her. She complained to one correspondent, “the story is huddled & hurried up … But what could I do? Every page was grudged to me … Just at the very last I was compelled to desperate compression” (Chappell and Pollard 328). In her Preface to the two-​volume edition of the novel in 1855, Gaskell asked her readers to be generous, as “the author found it impossible to develop the story in the manner originally intended, and, more especially, was compelled to hurry on events with an improbable rapidity towards the close” (5). Poor Mrs. Gaskell! Dickens admired her writing very much, calling her “my dear Scheherazade.” Yet she felt her vision for the novel was irreparably spoiled by the demands of weekly serialization. It is likely she and Dickens also had different visions for the book from the start. Gaskell’s working title for the novel was “Margaret Hale,” and she may have seen the story as a bildungsroman focused on the young heroine, rather than a trenchant study of industrialism. But given public awareness of recent worker strikes in Preston, Lancashire, Dickens wanted to emphasize the conflict between the factory hands and the millowners: he preferred the title “North and South” because it evoked contemporary events. Dickens was a businessman and an impresario, but he was never a mere pitchman. He sincerely respected the public for whom he wrote and he disliked novelists who spoke lightly of their craft. Dickens was especially bothered when writers dropped too many obvious hints in each serialized number and did not trust the reader’s intelligence in piecing together the plot. “I seem to have noticed, here and there, that the great pains you take express themselves a trifle too much,” he warned the younger Wilkie Collins, who was working on his great mystery novel The Woman in White (1860), “and you know that I always contest your disposition to give an audience credit for nothing, which necessarily involves the forcing of points on their attention, and which I have always observed them to resent when they find it out–​–​as they always will and do” (Selected Letters 351). Like great film directors, especially Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he has much in common, Dickens knew how to handle suspense artfully. And like Hitchcock, Dickens never forgot the audience. Indeed, no Victorian novelist could afford to alienate readers. If the novelist is “confused, tedious, harsh, or unharmonious, readers will certainly reject him,” claimed Anthony Trollope, which, he cheerfully conceded, readers have every right to do (213). “Nothing is to be got,” Dickens wrote to a correspondent in 1846, “by denying the public” (Engel 28). How serialization rose to prominence in the nineteenth century is a complicated story, involving changing demographics brought on by the industrial revolution, educational reforms, political unrest, tax laws, and economic downturns, and it includes the financial interests of those very

Seriality  15 important intermediaries between author and reader: the publisher and the bookseller. In the early 1800s, novels were limited-​circulation luxury items for people with means. If you were well-​off and wanted to read a novel by a respectable author such as Maria Edgeworth or Sir Walter Scott, or even one of those trashy gothic novels or sentimental romances that were becoming all the rage, you would either purchase it outright at a bookshop (very expensive) or subscribe to a commercial lending library and borrow it (still expensive). Most novels were printed in a single volume, easily read in a few days. Then in the year 1821, Walter Scott published Kenilworth, which set the mold for what the standard nineteenth-​century novel would be like: three volumes instead of one, at a cost of one and a half guineas, or you could by one volume at a time for 10/6 (10 shillings and 6 pence) per volume. This was still very upmarket, though. In the 1820s, 10/6 were roughly the average weekly wage for a manual laborer, out of which he also needed to buy food and pay the rent. Despite energetic advertisements from publishers and booksellers who claimed that a volume of the great Walter Scott’s was within reach of readers of all classes, a large chunk of the literate population in Britain at this time would have been priced out. Reading novels was a leisure activity for people with purchasing power. Novels were written by and for the educated middle-​classes. But there were many other things people could read for entertainment in the 1820s and 1830s besides expensively bound volumes by Scott. The early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented explosion in all kinds of cheap periodicals, some of them achieving circulations in the tens of thousands. It was the Wild West of publishing, brought on by the effects of the industrial revolution and urbanization. Thousands of men and women were leaving rural communities to work in factories in large cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. Magazines and newspapers proliferated to serve this new constituency, publishing a wide variety of writing, news, political commentary, police reports, and social satire. And it is in the pages of one of these “miscellanies,” as they were called, in February 1836, that the story of the Victorian novel as we know it begins, with a young parliamentary reporter whose comic sketches of London life were gaining popularity, and who was making a name for himself as “Boz.” The London firm of Edward Chapman and William Hall had been partners in the bookselling and publishing business since 1830. By the middle of the decade, their enterprise had expanded beyond book publishing to include illustrated magazines. Chapman and Hall were always on the lookout for fresh ideas. When a well-​known illustrator named Robert Seymour approached them with the concept of a series of cartoons about the misadventures of Cockney sportsmen, they set about looking for a writer who could supply short sketches to accompany Seymour’s caricatures. A friend suggested twenty-​four-​year-​old Charles Dickens, who was making quite a reputation for himself with his popular Sketches by Boz, short journalistic pieces about

16  Seriality London life that had been appearing in the Morning Chronicle. Seymour, Chapman, and Hall imagined a monthly publication featuring four etchings by the artist and some text written to match–​–​the assumption was that the writing would be secondary to the work of the illustrator, who would get top billing. Young Dickens had other ideas. He did not want to write funny anecdotes to go with Seymour’s drawings. He wanted to write a story, a group of connected incidents following a set of invented characters. But negotiations between writer, illustrator, and publishers were strained. Seymour was not happy to be demoted to second string, and he had serious personal and financial worries of his own. On 20 April 1836, he committed suicide. Dickens quickly proposed as a replacement a twenty-​one-​year-​old illustrator named Hablot K. Browne (nicknamed “Phiz”), and the two young men basically seized control of the project, steering Seymour’s original conception in an entirely new direction–​–​one that would determine the way Victorian novels were written, published, and experienced by readers for the next forty years. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club appeared in twenty monthly numbers between March 1836 and November 1837, every number wrapped in a soon to be familiar green paper. Each part was thirty-​two pages, included two illustrations, and cost readers just a shilling each, the last parts (numbers 19 and 20) giving them a bonus “double number” for two shillings, with sixty-​four pages and four illustrations. The Pickwick Papers were astoundingly popular, and sales absolutely soared after the introduction of the smart-​ mouthed valet Sam Weller in the fourth number, climbing to over 25,000 individual numbers sold, and making 40,000 by the end. “PICKWICK, TRIUMPHANT,” Dickens wrote to a correspondent in the spring of 1836. Readers laughed, reviewers raved, and even the most reputable journals published long and admiring assessments. This new setup was hugely profitable for everyone concerned, the publishers, the illustrator, and the author, who earned income while he was still writing and also shared net profits when the book appeared in volume form. Serial publication turned out to be a good deal for readers, too. As Robert L. Patten and Graham Law explain, At a stroke, this serial [Pickwick] comprising over six hundred pages and more than forty illustrations, reduced the cost of owning a new novel from 1 1/​2 guineas [slightly more than a pound] for three volumes paid at once–​–​the standard price and format from 1821 to 1894–​–​to a pound, paid out over nineteen months. (150) Economically, serialization was a win-​win situation for author, publisher, and purchaser. Pickwick set the machinery of serial publication in motion. The expediency and power of the serial formula was affirmed once and for all with the purchase of 50,000 copies of the first monthly part of Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby in March 1838. That book went on to yield profits of over £14,000,

Seriality  17 a huge amount, and that was before its publication in volume form (Patten, “Appendix,” 617). All of Dickens’s subsequent novels were composed for weekly or monthly serialization in periodicals, in the soon to be standard format of ten illustrated parts and the bonus double number for the last. By the 1840s, this piece-​by-​piece method of writing, publishing, and reading novels was the established custom of the country, although some authors who were not part of the London scene, such as the Brontës, sent their manuscripts to publishers in completed volumes (in their case, losing the copyright). Unlike completed volumes such as Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847), novels published in monthly parts were surrounded by advertisements, news, and other kinds of writing–​–​the first part of Dickens’s Dombey and Son, published 1 October 1846, had sixteen pages of advertisements! Readers’ eyes could easily wander from the pathos of Chapter 16 to an ad for medicinal drops or ladies’ stockings. It was a multimedia package. Authors who wrote for magazine serials could also monitor public response to a work in progress, and even change the direction of a story following early feedback from readers, or tease readers’ curiosity with the illustrations on the cover of each monthly number for clues about what it might contain. If serialization tied the hands of some authors, others thought the problem was with the three-​volume format. Both compromised artistic freedom by determining the work’s proportions. Novelists had to tread water in the first two volumes to save enough for the last or fill out each volume with a lot of exposition. Some authors, it is true, liked the longer format. “Critics often complain of the ordinary length of novels,” Trollope observed, “–​–​of the three volumes to which they are subjected; but few novels which have attained great success in England have been told in fewer pages” (216). Well-​ off readers who preferred to build their own personal library could purchase all three volumes of a novel from booksellers–​–​people who recognized the literary value of Dickens’s novels, for instance, would buy complete editions to keep on the household bookshelves. But if you could not afford to buy three-​ volume novels, for just a few guineas a year, you could subscribe to a circulating library that stocked different classes of novels that would be borrowed one volume at a time. The most famous circulating library was established in 1842 by Charles Edward Mudie. Mr. Mudie’s “Select Library” was designed for the respectable middle-​class reader. In the popular imagination, this person was a blushing young female, in accordance with the ideology of feminine sexual innocence–​–​the so-​called “young girl standard.” Nothing remotely racy was allowed into the Select Library. Mudie was a shrewd bookseller, and he knew what turned readers off, women readers especially, who were among his most dedicated customers. There were lending libraries without these pretensions, of course, and serials of all kinds were easily and cheaply available through general stores and itinerant peddlers. But by the 1860s, Mudie’s Select Library served as a kind of moral filter or culling service–​–​the Mudie stamp of approval gave a book a “G” (or maybe “PG”) rating, and other lending libraries usually followed suit. If Mr. Mudie refused to take a

18  Seriality book, that was that, and if a subscriber complained about a book she had borrowed, Mudie was prepared to pull it off the shelf. You can see how this policing of impurity would impede artistic innovation, cramp literary style, and force aspiring novelists to water down their books. By the 1880s, there was major backlash against triple-​deckers, the chokehold of serialization, and Mr. Mudie’s Select Library. Younger writers such as George Gissing and George Moore rebelled. They were tired of having to choose between upholding the integrity of their profession or writing insipid books for the mass market. Dickens had died in 1870, and George Eliot in 1881. Among writers of the younger generation, there was intense reaction against publishing practices and literary values perceived as “early Victorian.” Writers wanted the freedom to write about serious adult topics and to experiment with new forms–​ –​ naturalism, impressionism, symbolism–​ –​ without “the moral and aesthetic tyranny of the ‘select’ library and the ‘family’ magazine” (Patten and Law 169). A spirited debate took place in the pages of The Pall Mall Gazette in 1884 under the headline “The New Censorship in Literature.” It was launched by the Irish novelist George Moore, whose book A Modern Lover (1883), though praised by reviewers, fell flat financially because Mr. Mudie objected to the morality of one scene and refused to stock it. “At the head of English literature, therefore,” Moore raged, “sits a tradesman, who considers himself qualified to decide the most delicate artistic questions that may be raised, and who crushes out of sight any artistic aspiration he may deem pernicious.”3 But Moore fought a losing battle for years. Even Thomas Hardy, who by 1890 was one of the most famous and widely admired novelists in England, was beholden to nervous publishers and magazine editors who could not afford to offend middle-​class sensibilities. More than one editor turned down Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) unless Hardy agreed to significant changes in the manuscript–​–​including the delicately erotic scene in which Angel Clare carries Tess and the other milkmaids over a flooded road. Instead, Hardy had to have Angel push Tess across in a wheelbarrow. We should keep in mind that in the early decades of the century, in the 1830s and 1840s, most of Britain’s population was working class or poor. These people had little or no formal education and insecure food and housing. If they worked in textile mills their lives were monotonous, exhausting, and unhealthy–​–​as attested by Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South, novels whose cost and literary sophistication would be out of reach for this working-​class population. London publishers supplied this constituency with a different kind of entertainment: exciting, lurid serials in penny weekly numbers, the ubiquitous “penny dreadfuls.” They sold like mad. Varney, the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood had a particularly long and popular run in 1845–​47 before being reissued in a monster-​sized volume, and G. W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London, which first began its serialization in 1844, outsold everything, with a circulation of 40,000 copies a week

Seriality  19 and over a million parts before being reissued in volumes–​–​this was while Reynolds was simultaneously churning out one hair-​raising tale after another for a low-​market miscellany, in competition with dozens just like it (Patten and Law 153). In The English Common Reader, Richard Altick notes, The longevity of the “penny dreadful” serial novels was remarkable. One of the most popular, Black Bess, ran to 2,067 pages and was issued over a span of almost five years, after which—​the market giving no evidence of satiety—​a sequel was begun. (292) Over the next couple of decades, working-​class readers could choose among shilling monthlies, penny dailies, sixpenny parts, or fivepenny newspapers carrying serial fiction. Going to the corner newsstand to buy the latest number of your favorite paper soon became a regular habit, part of a working-​ class Londoner’s social routine. Middle-​ class readers had access to more cultured magazines, such as Blackwood’s (publisher of George Eliot’s novels), The Cornhill, edited by Thackeray, and Dickens’s two magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round. There were also niche magazines such as Belgravia, edited by bestselling novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, which specialized in the compulsively readable sub-​genre known as sensation novels, stories thick with mystery and sexual tension, usually structured around a scandalous secret–​–​ bigamy, adultery, illegitimacy, murder–​–​and written in a style meant to jangle the nerves. Sensation novels were the literary fad of the 1860s, and they capitalized greatly on the built-​in suspense of serialization. Sensation thrillers seemed to have been especially popular with women readers, creating a moral panic among more conservative reviewers (though other venues, such as Punch, turned to parody). In a lengthy essay in the April 1863 issue of The Quarterly Review, a writer named H. L. Mansel reviewed no less than 24 sensation novels in an effort to understand the wide appeal of this brazen new genre. He concluded that the sensation phenomenon was brought on by three regrettable developments in the new literary culture: periodicals, circulating libraries, and railway bookstalls. First, said Mansel, the periodicals are to blame because they carry “articles of an ephemeral interest … containing so many lines per sheet.” Tales in periodicals must be marketable above all else, and stories aimed “at electrifying the nerves of the reader” sell papers. The second stage of the work “in the form of a handsome reprint” sold “under the auspices of the circulating library,” did just as much damage: for fifty years, Mansel wrote, circulating libraries have been “the chief hot-​bed for forcing a crop of writers without talent and readers without discrimination … giving us the latest fashion, and little more.” The third culprit is the railway stall, which “like the circulating library, consists partly of books written expressly for its use, partly of reprints in a new phase of their existence … with small print and cheap paper” (what later became known in the

20  Seriality United States as pulp fiction). The booksellers W. H. Smith and Sons opened its first shop at Euston Station in 1848, hawking two-​shilling reprints of bestsellers. Publishers produced special “railway editions,” such as George Routledge’s “Railway Library,” marketed to consumers for reading on the train. In negation of the old adage, these railway books could be judge by their “tawdry covers,” observed Mansel, often ornamented “with a highly-​ coloured picture hung out like a signboard, to give promise of the entertainment to be had within.”4 Henry Mansel, Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University, was a conservatively minded theologian who struggled to keep up with the works of game-​changing intellectuals such as Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and F. D. Maurice. The authors of sensation fiction were not writing their novels for people like him. Yet Mansel was not alone in his concern about the major appeal of these novels to the younger generation (and even the older). They grabbed the restless attention and morbid curiosity of susceptible readers, an omen of “a wide-​spread corruption … the cravings of a diseased appetite.” More than this, though, sensation novels were a bad sign for the future of the English novel. Was churning out “an impure or a silly crop of novels” one after the other a favorable symptom of the “conditions of the body of society”? Younger readers who had never read a word by the great Walter Scott were able to rattle off the titles of the last ten novels about murder and bigamy without batting an eye! How can we ever hope, Mansel thought, to cultivate in the rising generation a taste for a better class of fiction, when these exciting books are produced and devoured so quickly? Among the twenty-​four novels Mansel discussed are some we still read and enjoy today, including Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862) and Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863), all three runaway bestsellers as serials and books, all of them quickly adapted for the stage, and later into silent films (and even later into television miniseries). But what about the other novels Mansel reviewed? What happened to The Last Days of a Bachelor (1862) by James M’Grigor Allan, Only a Woman (1860) by Sir Lascelles Wraxall, Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady (1862) by Elizabeth Caroline Gray, or Spurs and Skirts (1862) by someone called Allet? Digital technology and the Internet have made it easier for librarians, historians, and literary scholars to recover these books and to learn more about the many Victorian novels that have disappeared: The Last Days of a Bachelor, Only a Woman, Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady, and Spurs and Skirts are all discoverable through the website “At the Circulating Library,” with links to the full e-​books (curiously, the identity of “Allet” cannot be traced). Researchers estimate that between 1837 and 1901, over 60,000 novels were published in the United Kingdom by more than 7,000 different authors (Sutherland 1).5 Though all but a few of those 7,000 have been lost or forgotten, the data clearly tells us that Victorian England was ravenous for stories, that there were plenty of writers with ready pens and bursting imaginations eager to supply them, and many publishers on hand

Seriality  21 to deliver up their products at a cheap and steady rate. As literacy rates improved throughout the 1800s and books became cheaper and easier to acquire, novels reached all classes of people, and there was “a vast sea of common readers” (Altick Common Reader 274). “Novels are read right and left,” wrote the prolific Anthony Trollope in his Autobiography (1883), “above stairs and below, in town houses and in country parsonages, by young countesses and by farmers’ daughters, by old lawyers and by young students” (199). Many of these novels appeared in periodicals aimed at special sub-​ groups of readers. Just as today, there were novels for every taste–​–​criminal, nautical, comical, industrial, imperial, scientific, fantastic, horrific. There was a lot of creative blurring among genres, too. You name it, the Victorians wrote it. And even invented it. I have offered this condensed socio-​ economic picture to remind you that the Victorian novel as it appeared in periodicals was a democratic, modern, commercial product meant to give pleasure to many different kinds of people. Nineteenth-​century novels were not published privately for a small group of intellectuals–​–​George Eliot’s learning and intelligence are intimidating, but even she did not write fiction for a handful of discerning intellectuals. Because most middle-​ class novelists did not have private incomes, writing was both an art and a livelihood: Braddon was a former actress, and Trollope was employed as a civil servant for the post office for over thirty years. Neither of them were ashamed of the rate at which they wrote and published (between them they produced more than eighty novels) and both sought popularity. Unlike many writers today, Victorian novelists did not write fiction to express themselves or explore their psyches. Novels were understood as public utterances and as forms of mass entertainment. Victorian novelists could not toil or tinker with a book for years, and when satisfied declare the work finished and deliver it to a waiting world. There was too much competition! At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned how critics who held to Aristotelian principles found the modern English novel seriously flawed and blamed serialization and the straitjacket of the triple-​decker for its artistic defects. But there were also commentators who took a more positive view. Novels were a potent cultural force, some argued, the defining art form of the age. It became a critical commonplace to hold that “the multitudinous and multiform novel,” in the words of one reviewer, had become the modern substitute for the drama and the epic (Tillotson 13). And it was precisely this diversity and multitudinousness, the capacity to represent all levels of society and to reach so many people that made the novel culturally important, influential, and dynamic. Historians agree that the novel thrived in the nineteenth century because of the growth of democratic principles. The novel served as a mirror for modern life in “an age of transition,” as John Stuart Mill defined it, describing and reflecting a changing society from a controlled moral perspective (5) Novels offered a human angle on a complex world, a perspective

22  Seriality that was often overtly didactic, rich in topical specificities and in recognizable types of characters. Novels addressed systemic problems the average person needed help understanding–​ –​ and I mean serious, society-​ wide problems, such as the gross disparity in wealth throughout England, child labor, urban slums, air and water pollution, the spread of disease, poverty and homelessness, and routine exploitation and injustice based on structural inequalities. The popularity of serial publication throughout the nineteenth century is not just about demographics or economics. Serials are entwined in the story of democratic advancement. They reflect an orientation to life, a set of values, even a phenomenology of being that belongs to forward-​thinking nineteenth-​century liberalism. The serial is symptomatic of comprehensive psychological changes in the ways people apprehended their world.6 In their seminal work, The Victorian Serial, Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund proposed that “something in the culture of the time made it especially receptive to the serial” (4). Their introductory chapter offers a few theories about how novel serialization is connected to the Victorian frame of mind generally, and how the whole experience of writing and reading novels was informed by the system of part-​by-​part publication. First, serials harmonized with the new capitalist ideology: the faith that a modest expenditure of time and money now would reap rewards later. Reading a novel serialized in a magazine was not a race to the end, but a patient investment requiring a wait-​and-​watch mentality (rags-​to-​riches stories were especially popular). There were also dramatic changes in the ways people understood time throughout the nineteenth century. Technological innovations–​–​the railroad, the telegraph, the assembly line–​–​sped everything up, while new discoveries in geology, biology, and archeology emphasized the immensity and slowness of time. Both registers are analogs to the contraction and expansion of time spent reading a serial novel–​–​short bursts of installments, archeology-​like layers, the gradual unfolding of events over a period of weeks or months. Serial fiction also mirrored the British faith in incremental social and political progress. Rather than a sudden apocalypse or revolutionary uprising, British liberalism held to the idea that change occurred incrementally, and that reform required patience and perseverance. Purchasing serials or borrowing books one volume at a time also underscored democratic values by offering opportunities for people of all classes to share their reading lives. Before every room in a house had electric lighting, it was common for members of the household, servants included, to gather in a common room and listen to a family member read aloud from the latest installment in a magazine or a volume of a triple-​decker borrowed from a circulating library. Serials thus created a loose community of readers. Even people who were illiterate could join a gathering of listeners in a tavern or boarding house to hear the newest number of a Dickens novel. People talked and gossiped about characters and plots. Excitement built as “Magazine Day” arrived. “It took a degree of self-​discipline few men possessed,” observes Altick, “to listen to one’s friends speculating on what would happen in Mr.

Seriality  23 Dickens’s next number and yet delay one’s own reading of the book until, long months in the future, it was complete, bound, and available in the circulating library” (280). Who could hold out for that long? It’s the Victorian version of FOMO. Hughes and Lund suggest that “a work’s extended duration meant that serials would become entwined with readers’ own sense of lived experience and passing time” (8). Reading was an ordinary, everyday activity, something done in the middle of living. Much of what made literature meaningful to the Victorian reader had a pronounced temporal dimension. Probably because of all those Victorian paintings of a woman reclining on a sofa with a book in her hands, I am used to imagining Victorian readers mentally luxuriating over a novel or dreaming over a book with an air of abstraction. I don’t tend to imagine a clerk or a governess rushing around Paddington Station and distractedly picking up a magazine serial to kill time between trains. Yet that may be closer to the way it was, and magazines, after all, are quite small and portable.7 It’s difficult for cultural historians to say with certainty how actual Victorian readers experienced serialized novels.8 Did they linger over every number, studying the story’s nuances because they knew they would have to wait a whole month for the next installment? Did they bolt one story after another in a frenzy of binge reading? The so-​called “common reader” is an elusive being. In the absence of diaries, letters, or autobiographies, we can only guess what people’s experiences could have been. Contemporary reviews might give us an idea of how a novel was received, but reviewers had a job to do. They cannot be counted on to represent the average middle-​class reader’s experience. Lack of hard evidence makes it a guessing game. Richard Altick, for instance, paints a different picture: We can … be reasonably certain that a fair number of [readers] were what Kathleen Tillotson calls “novel addicts”, persons who habitually read voraciously, but superficially and indiscriminately. The minds they brought to a time-​killing perusal of, say, Dombey and Son were at once smooth (offering no traction for ideas) and soft (offering no defence against artistic manipulation). Novel addicts, therefore, offer a special and probably insoluble problem: on the one hand, simply because they read with their minds more or less in a state of suspension, they may have been the members of the audience who were most unaffected by whatever stratagems Dickens adopted to move them; on the other, they may have been the most affected, because they were incapable of resisting. Unless their sensibilities were jaded beyond hope of cure, we may no doubt assume that they reacted in a crude predictable manner to Dickens’s large, obvious effects. But the quieter touches would have gone unnoticed. (Altick “Varieties” 75) And yet, who can say for sure? Like fans of movies or television shows today, Victorian readers may have been addicts, but they also may have

24  Seriality been shrewd consumers, or even “ironic” consumers who bought the next installment of Spurs and Skirts because they liked to make fun of how bad it was.9 By the middle of Dickens’s serialization of Dombey and Son, perhaps readers were already becoming better at observing his “quieter touches,” and they may have had excellent powers of retention. Maybe they did appreciate Dickens’s careful craftsmanship–​–​as Tillotson points out, Dombey and Son was the first novel for which Dickens made notes, and he undertook meticulous planning from beginning to end, avoiding loose ends, relating minor characters and small episodes to his overall design, keeping the moral theme front and center. His artistry helped the reader to stay with the story, in just the ways those algorithmic studies I mentioned earlier suggest. Scholars agree that Dombey and Son was a turning point in Dickens’s career, a shift toward greater narrative control, tighter social analysis, and more sophisticated use of symbolism and psychology. Many reviewers found the novel astonishingly good, a clear advance over some of his looser and more episodic books. Dickens’s friend and literary competitor, William Makepeace Thackeray, who was serializing Vanity Fair at the same time Dombey and Son was coming out, reportedly reacted to the fifth number with bewildered admiration: “There’s no writing against such power as this–​ –​One has no chance! … it is unsurpassed–​–​it is stupendous!” (P. Collins 219). Other readers thought some scenes were far-​fetched, or that the sea motif was overdone or cloying: full to over-​flowing of waves whispering and wandering; of dark rivers rolling to the sea, of winds, and golden ripples, and such like matters, which are sometimes very pretty, generally very untrue, and have become, at all events, excessively stale. (P. Collins 213) Yet each monthly number of Dombey and Son outsold the previous one, so that by the end, says Altick, “it is possible that the total audience for Dombey and Son in 1846–​48 amounted to half a million persons” (“Varieties” 71). Dombey and Son set the template for what a great serial novel could be: suspenseful, symbolically unified, and emotionally centered in the heroine’s struggle for love and acceptance. It also has a great villain in Mr. Carker the Manager. White is his color and sleek is his adjective, and in March 1848, in the eighteenth monthly installment and the last before the final double number, Mr. Carker with his white cravat, his soft white hand, his pure white linen, and his clean white teeth comes to a very shocking and very violent end indeed. I have never read a Victorian novel in its original serial parts, but good arguments have been made for trying to “read like a Victorian,” as the scholar Robyn Warhol puts it. Indeed, Warhol offers us an interesting exercise in

Seriality  25 time travel. Imagine it is January of 1847 and you have just stepped out to your nearest London shop to pick up the fourth installment of Dombey and Son. This week also begins the first number of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, sold at the same shop or railway stall, its bright yellow cover contrasting with Dombey’s familiar pale green one. You have been eagerly reading both novels’ installments through the winter and summer, and now it is nine months later, October 1847 (number 13 of Dombey, number 10 of Vanity Fair), when a phenomenal new romance called Jane Eyre by an unknown author named Currer Bell is published as a triple-​decker. You simply must get your hands on it, but it is too expensive to buy all three volumes, so you pay your guinea subscription fee and borrow one volume at a time from Mudie’s. Reading all three books simultaneously, holding in your mind Becky Sharp’s scheming in Vanity Fair, Florence Dombey’s emotional confusion in Dombey and Son, and Jane Eyre’s harrowing ordeal at Lowood School, you’re struck by the fact that the heroines of all three books are motherless girls in hostile surroundings, self-​reliant and resourceful, and yet they are in every way completely different from one another.10 What else, I wonder, would a Victorian reader notice with three stories spinning out in her imagination at the same time? If you want to experiment with this kind of “synchronous reading,” Warhol has created a webtool which indexes and links installments of different novels in their same “serial moment.” It’s available at victorianserialnovels.org. Poking around the Internet for other experiments with serial reading, I came across a group on Goodreads. Led by a more experienced reader, the group began to read Dombey and Son on 14 February 2021, one chapter a day, 62 in all, posting questions and comments after every chapter. “There are many chapters where I felt for the original readers who had to wait for the next installment of the story,” posted one member. “No wonder the magazines were such a hit. I’d be standing at the Newsstand with my pence, waiting for the next issue to be displayed.” Or: “It’s been so hard not to read ahead, especially this past week with all that’s happened in the story!” Or: “Initially, when reading the book and Dickens was introducing all of the characters, I got the feeling we were being introduced to all of the instruments in the orchestra. I thought Dickens did such a great job of ‘creating’ Mrs. Richards (and her family) and then she disappeared from the book. I couldn’t imagine going to all of the trouble of creating such a person not to have them reappear. Ha! Mr. Dickens did not let me down … hello Mrs. Richards and loved ones!” Imagine if you missed the serial installment and had to wait to borrow the book when it came out in separate volumes. How would you avoid spoilers? Much to an author’s frustration, book reviewers were fairly careless about revealing the plot. Wilkie Collins, who took great pains to conceal the mystery in The Woman in White until the very end of the serial, begged reviewers in his 1860 Preface to the three-​volume edition to try not to give anything away. Is the critic, Collins asked, “doing a service to the reader, by destroying,

26  Seriality beforehand, two main elements in the attraction of all stories—​the interest of curiosity, and the excitement of surprise?” (5) Serial reading may also give you an idea of how Victorian literary culture was organized by bringing you closer to a novel’s emotional rhythms. Reading in the original monthly parts may help you to live inside those long Victorian sentences, so you notice more of the artistry in each chunk, rather than skimming or skipping or worrying about those goal posts. But the fact is that we will never read Dombey and Son with the subjectivity of its original readers in 1847 and 1848. That is one reason I find comments from Victorian readers so curious and compelling. What was it like, I want to know, to experience a book that today we think of as a classic with all the freshness and excitement of serial publication? Charles Kent, later a close friend of Dickens’s, was an avid reader and reviewer. As Dombey and Son was making its way through serialization, Kent published an almost monthly play-​by-​play of his thoughts about each installment. I doubt if Dickens ever had a more dedicated fan. Here is what Kent wrote in his very last review, which appeared on 13 April 1848, at the completion of the last double number of Dombey: An old friend has left us–​–​the voice of a dear favourite is silent–​–D ​ ombey and Son is completed. Heartily do we regret this, for this true English story-​book, which has appeared from month to month, with its chequered incidents, its exquisite and touching pathos, its frequent, spontaneous, and fantastic merriment, its occasional grotesqueness, its pervading loyalty to the natural, the true, and the beautiful, its home-​touches, its gleams of satire, its erotic benevolence [sic], its unforced philosophy, and above all its many, strange, original, life-​like, and admirable characters–​–​the true English story, we say, in which all this has been lavished with the abundance of a fruitful but untutored genius, has imparted so much zest to every successive interval in the course of its publication, has scattered, as it were, such sweet flowers upon the dusty path of life, while Time has been rolling us all onward to Eternity, that we should be ungrateful were we not to lament its termination. We do regret it–​–​thoroughly. […] Those, and there are thousands of them, who have, like ourselves, devoured the work bit by bit–​–​familiarising themselves by long association with the every characteristic of the ideal personages depicted in the narrative–​–​and coming at last to regard with a sort of tenderness even the green covers of the monthly instalment, as being connected in some fashion with the joys and sorrows of the story, and by consequence with their own tears and laughter, will comprehend our regret at the dispersion of this imaginary multitude. (P. Collins 228) The motif of time passing is woven throughout Dombey and Son, from the first chapter to the very last. So, it seems appropriate for Kent to structure his

Seriality  27 review in the idiom of a farewell, evoking also the reader’s bondage to temporality: “Time rolling us all onward to Eternity.” As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, Dickens always had ambivalent emotions when a serialization, the labor of a year and half, had finished its run. When Dombey was over, he reciprocated Kent’s valedictory emotions in his 1848 Preface to the three-​ volume edition: “I cannot forego my usual opportunity of saying farewell to my readers in this greeting place, though I have only to acknowledge the unbounded warmth and earnestness of their sympathy in every stage of the journey we have just concluded.” May we meet again! Spotlight When you read Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, you may hardly register the author’s frustrations with the serial form, the novel is so saturated with feeling, drama, and romantic tension. If you’re attune to the tick-​tock of the weekly serial, you might notice that some major incidents are packed in pretty tightly after Chapter 48, and the happy resolution seems a bit tacked on. But that does not at all ruin this splendid and moving portrait of English life during a time of unprecedented social upheaval. North and South centers on a young middle-​ class woman from the agrarian south of England who is forced to deal with unaccustomed social conflict, and even violence, when she moves with her family to Milton, an industrial town in the north (based on Manchester). Margaret Hale is a strongly sympathetic and independent-​minded heroine, but because she is from bucolic Hampshire and the daughter of a genteel clergyman, she has certain prejudices. “I don’t like shoppy people,” she tells her mother. “I like all people whose occupations have to do with land” (19). When her family moves to the industrial north, she has a lot to adjust to: there is Milton’s harsher climate, “the heavy smoky air that hangs in her bedroom at night” (61), the town with its “faint taste and smell of smoke” and the “long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly-​built houses, all small and of brick” (55), the “streams of men and women” that pour out of the mills two or three times a day “with bold, fearless faces, and loud laughs and jests, particularly aimed at all those who appeared to be above them in rank or station” (66). Gradually Margaret learns to understand her new environment through her friendships with people from both sides of the class divide. The factory worker Nicholas Higgins and his family are counterparts to the mill owner John Thornton, a self-​made man who scorns the idleness of fine gentlemen and ladies as well as those members of the working class who fail to improve themselves. Gaskell, though, deliberately avoids reductive characterization. Both Higgins and Thornton exhibit virtues as well as flaws, and both are stubbornly entrenched in values and beliefs belonging to their class and milieu. Margaret wonders at

28  Seriality “two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own: I never lived in a place before where there were two sets of people always running each other down.” (109) As a Condition of England novel, North and South is a comprehensive, complex, and sensitive analysis of class division. But Gaskell does not lecture, and she does not take sides. She moves the reader to sympathize with individuals, not with abstractions or theories–​–​just as the people of Milton must learn to see each person’s situation with an open mind and a sympathetic heart in order for things to change: “He and they had led parallel lives,” thinks Thornton, “—​very close, but never touching—​till the accident (or so it seemed) of his acquaintance with Higgins. Once brought face to face, man to man, with an individual of the masses around him, and (take notice) out of the character of master and workman … they had each begun to recognise that ‘we have all of us one human heart’ ” (380). North and South is also a love story, and there are some steamy scenes between Margaret and John. His heart beat thick at the thought of her coming. He could not forget the touch of her arms around his neck, impatiently felt as it had been at the time; but now the recollection of her clinging defence of him, seemed to thrill him through and through,—​to melt away every resolution, all power of self-​control, as if it were wax before a fire. (175) Erotic tension, class conflict, and tender portraits of parent–​child relationships all make North and South a truly gripping read. Notes 1 See https://​wor​dsra​ted.com/​best​sell​ing-​books-​have-​never-​been-​shor​ter/​ 2 See Bernstein and DeRose, “Reading Numbers by Numbers: Digital Studies and the Victorian Serial Novel.” 3 The entire newspaper correspondence and Moore’s pamphlet, Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals is accessible at archive.org. 4 Mansel, “Sensation Novels,” Quarterly Review 113 (April 1863), pp. 482–​514. Accessed at http://​gasli​ght-​lit.s3-​webs​ite.ca-​cent​ral-​1.amazon​aws.com/​gasli​ght/​ sensn​ovl.htm 5 “At the Circulating Library,” a database of Victorian fiction, at this writing contains entries for 22,434 titles; 5,119 authors; and 704 publishers. 6 As recently argued by Claire Pettitt in her projected three-​volume study, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–​ 1848 (2020) and Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form (2022).

Seriality  29 7 If you are a modern young lady out for a brisk autumn walk, you might tuck a novel under your arm, as in James Tissot’s dynamic 1877 painting, October. I’ve used it for the cover of this book. 8 See Rose, “How Historians Study Reader Response,” and Altick, The English Common Reader, especially Chapter 1. For a more recent analysis of reception theory, see Bailin’s review essay, “Victorian Readers.” 9 On the ironic consumer of mass entertainment, see Ang, Watching Dallas, pp. 96–​102. 10 See Warhol, “Seriality.”

Works Cited Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–​1900. University of Chicago Press, 1959. —​ —​ —​ . “Varieties of Readers’ Response: The Case of Dombey and Son.” The Yearbook of English Studies, no. 10 (1980), pp. 70–​94. Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. Routledge, 1982. Bagehot, Walter. “The Novels of George Eliot.” National Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (April 1860), pp. 191–​219. Bailin, Miriam. “Victorian Readers.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 44, no. 3 (2016), pp. 727–​39. Bernstein, Susan David and Catherine DeRose, “Reading Numbers by Numbers: Digital Studies and the Victorian Serial Novel.” Victorian Review, vol. 38, no. 2 (Fall 2012), pp. 43–​68. Chappell, J. A.V. and Arthur Pollard, editors. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. Manchester University Press, 1997. Collins, Philip, editor. Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage. Barnes and Noble, 1971. Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. 1860. Penguin, 2003. Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. 1848. Penguin, 2002. —​—​—​. Oliver Twist. 1837. Penguin, 2003. —​—​—​. Selected Letters of Charles Dickens. Edited by Jenny Hartley, Oxford University Press, 2012. Engel, Monroe, “Dickens on Art.” Modern Philology, vol. 53, no. 1 (August 1955), pp. 25–​38. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. James R. Osgood & Company, 1875. Accessed at www.gutenb​erg.org. Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1855. W. W. Norton, 2005. Hughes, Linda K. and Michael Lund. The Victorian Serial. University Press of Virginia, 1991. James, Henry. “Preface to The Tragic Muse.” The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Roger Gard, Penguin, 1987, pp. 511–​28. Mansel, H. L. “Sensation Novels.” Quarterly Review, no. 113 (April 1863), pp. 482–​ 514. Accessed at http://​gasli​ght-​lit.s3-​webs​ite.ca-​cent​ral-​1.amazon​aws.com/​gasli​ ght/​sensn​ovl.htm Martin, Carol A. George Eliot’s Serial Fiction. Ohio State University Press, 1994. Mill, John Stuart. “The Spirit of the Age.” Mill, edited by Alan Ryan, W. W. Norton, 1997, pp. 3–40.

30  Seriality Patten, Robert L. “Appendix I. The Sale of Dickens’s Works.” Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage, edited by Philip Collins, Barnes and Noble, 1971, pp. 617–​20. Patten, Robert L. and Graham Law. “The Serial Revolution.” The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. VI, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pettitt, Claire. Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–​ 1848. Oxford University Press, 2020. —​—​—​. Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form. Oxford University Press, 2022. Rose, Jonathan. “How Historians Study Reader Response, or What Did Jo Think of Bleak House?” Literature in the Marketplace, edited by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 195–​212. Stang, Richard. The Theory of the Novel in England 1850–​1870. Columbia University Press, 1959. Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1990. Tillotson, Geoffrey and Donald Hawes, editors. William Makepeace Thackeray: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1968. Tillotson, Kathleen. The Novels of the Eighteen-​forties. Oxford University Press, 1955. Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. 1883. Penguin, 1993. Warhol, Robyn. “Seriality.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, nos. 3–​4 (Fall/​ Winter 2018), pp. 873–​76.

2 Plots

In the previous chapter, I discussed how some Victorian critics worried that serial publication would debase the art of the novel. The need to keep the reader emotionally involved in the story through many months depended on the overuse of sensational incidents and the clunky machinery of coincidence, surprise, and suspense. The Aristotelian concept of a great unifying action had deteriorated into a messy arrangement of subplots and episodes, written to appeal to shallow, simple emotions and relying on melodramatic scenarios–​–​familiar tearjerkers that pit an innocent young female against a corrupt and lecherous villain, or describe the schemes of a hard, avaricious aristocrat, Lord M., to thwart the familial claims of a starving, shivering girl in rags–​–​a mere child!–​–​barefoot in the snowy and mud-​slung streets of the heartless metropolis, begging for any show of kindness and charity, and this though she is the daughter of his own sister, the beautiful Lady Amelia, cast off by him for marrying a poor man against his wishes–​–​she, who is at this very moment lying on the brink of death just outside his gate! I made this plot up. But it is not improbable that there exists a Victorian novel that deploys the same tropes, leading perhaps to a happy ending (the tearful reunion of uncle and niece, thus restoring her to her rightful place in society), or to an unhappy one (in which the remorseful Lord M. searches all of London for his niece only to find her frozen body in a deserted churchyard), or, and this does happen in Victorian fiction, to an ending that is neither happy nor unhappy. But my generic plot is nothing compared to those of Victorian novelists, those spectacularly imaginative plotters who brazenly stitched together the strangest events with a kind of sly gusto, as if they dared readers to question the plausibility of their inventions. What tangled webs they wove, and how deftly they gathered all the threads together at the end!1 Leafing through the plot summaries in John Sutherland’s assiduous Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, mentioned briefly in Chapter 1, is both entertaining and illuminating. Imagine single-​handedly taking on the job of finding and reading 554 long Victorian novels (a drop in the bucket), both the famous and the forgotten, and composing plot synopses for them–​–​and DOI: 10.4324/9781003388401-3

32  Plots this was in the 1980s, before everyone had personal computers, let alone Internet databases and search engines. Here is Sutherland’s summary of the plot for A Terrible Temptation, a triple-​decker published in 1871 by the bestselling novelist and playwright Charles Reade: The early narrative centres on the rivalry of two cousins, Sir Charles and Richard Bassett. The latter is a malcontent who conceives himself done out of his inheritance. Moreover, Sir Charles is a rival suitor to Arabella Bruce, the red-​haired heiress whom both men woo. Charles is the preferred lover and eventually marries Arabella. The plot thickens with the replacement of one of Richard’s bastard babies for the legitimate Bassett heir, Bella initially proving barren (the blood mother is a resourceful servant, Mary Wells). Sir Charles (who is unaware of the transfer) after being provoked by Richard, falls into an epileptic fit, and is kidnapped and incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. … There follows Reade’s customary rescue. The false heir Reginald grows up a scapegrace and his parentage is finally revealed and Richard’s daughter marries Charles’s second (and true-​born) son. (622–​3) Pretty great, and there are even incidental side plots involving lunacy certification fraud, a detective modeled on the author, and a portrait of a discarded mistress, which caused The Times to warn mothers to keep the first volume away from their unmarried daughters. Reade was notorious for his outrageous and theatrical plots, but he knew he had to go to extremes to expose corruption and social injustice. Never a more zealous enemy of vice than Charles Reade! Unless it was the remarkably prolific Anglican author, Charlotte Yonge. Her novel, Hopes and Fears, or Scenes from the Life of a Spinster (interesting title), was published in 1860. Here is Sutherland’s condensation: The novel has a complex plot. Honora, the heroine, loves Owen Sandbrook, a clergyman intent on converting the Red Indian. He lapses from his high ideals, takes a comfortable living, marries a rich wife and has two children. Honora, though she has marriage offers from a rich cousin, Humfrey, remains a spinster. Years later, having become trustee of her cousin’s wealth, she and Owen (now a widower) are reconciled just before his death from overwork. Honora takes charge of his children, both of whom go to the bad, before repenting and returning to Christian courses. Honora is assisted by Phoebe, a virtuous girl who marries the long-​lost heir of the rich cousin. (305) When Yonge wrote Hopes and Fears, she was thirty-​seven and single. She never married, so there may be a little of herself in Honora. She lived a

Plots  33 long life, from 1823 to 1901, and published over 150 books, including The Daisy Chain, an 1856 bestseller about the trials of a good-​hearted but quick-​ tempered widower, Doctor May, and his eleven motherless children, and its sequel, The Trial: More Links of the Daisy Chain, in 1863, in which the son of Doctor May’s partner, Leonard Ward, is falsely accused of murder and imprisoned for three years while Doctor May’s son, Tom, seeks out the real murderer who is dying in Paris, thus liberating Leonard, who becomes a missionary, and later bringing home Leonard’s invalid sister, Averil, who had run away to America, and marrying her. Sutherland suggests that in The Trial, Yonge’s twisty plot catered to the Sensation fad of the 1860s, and contributed to the novel’s enormous popularity (Sutherland 168, 685). One more plot outline. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, from 1859, is the first important novel by the great Victorian man of letters, George Meredith. Sutherland calls him “the least read major novelist of the Victorian period” (429). Meredith is best known for his sonnet sequence about a crumbling marriage, Modern Love (1862), as well as for his strongly feminist novels Diana of the Crossways (1885) and The Egoist (1879). The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is the book that both made and tarnished George Meredith’s name in Victorian literary culture. Here is the plot: The hero’s mother deserts her husband and Richard Feverel is brought up by his father Sir Austin on scientific educational principles. The “system” (which kept Richard secluded at home) is tested to the breaking point when the boy falls in love with Lucy Desborough, the niece of a neighboring farmer. Sir Austin opposes the match, and the young couple marry secretly. In London, Lucy and Richard are exposed to various trials. He is seduced by a courtesan; she attracts the attention of Lord Mountfalcon. The couple separate … and Lucy, unknown to her husband, bears a child. Sir Austin is finally brought round to approval of his daughter-​in-​law. But Richard is badly wounded in a duel with Mountfalcon. Lucy goes mad and dies while her husband lies paralysed, a triumph of his father’s “system”. (481) I confess I have not read Reade’s A Terrible Temptation or Yonge’s Hopes and Fears. But years ago, I did read The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and as I remember it there is much more going on than Sutherland’s plot synopsis suggests (this is true of all books and of all films). The prose is a bit heavy, Meredith being an acquired taste, but The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is a mature novel of ideas–​–​in fact, Mr. Mudie banned the novel from his circulating library due to Meredith’s frank treatment of sexuality, thereby damaging its early sales and blighting Meredith’s reputation. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel deploys tabloid plot devices–​–​a forbidden marriage, seduction, insanity, and even a duel–​–​and yet some scholars have identified it as the first truly modern British novel.2 E. M. Forster, author of celebrated early twentieth-​century novels such as A Passage to India (1924) and Howards

34  Plots End (1910), called Meredith “the finest contriver that English fiction has ever produced and any lecture on plot must do homage to him.”3 Meredith’s novels delightfully exploit bizarre and unexpected incidents. The reader of Meredith can feel bewildered at times. His sentences can be mazy, and his wit is often elaborate and perplexing. But after a while you begin to trust that you are in very good hands, and that all is well–​–​at least, when it comes to the plot. I hope that these three lesser-​known Victorian novels are not on your personal Want to Read list, and that no one will accuse me of spoiling them. I chose them because they share a few of the characteristics–​–​the stereotypes, really–​ –​ that people tend to associate with Victorian fiction: rival lovers, wicked seducers, thwarted courtships, mysterious births, false inheritances, illegitimacy, lunacy, and a few long and lingering deaths. I know it is tempting, given this century’s (questionable) sophistication, to laugh at the melodramatic extremes of some Victorian plots when they are detached from the texture of the whole novel. That is far from my intention in offering you Charles Reade, Charlotte Yonge, and the great contriver, Meredith. For not only can you not tell a book’s overall worth by a short synopsis of the plot (of course), but you also cannot know anything about how the plot is handled by any author, and what his or her intentions may have been in constructing it. In the hands of a serious writer who has something to say about contemporary mores and human life generally, a preposterous plot is not to be discredited. The plot of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is full of implausible and desperate happenings: in the very first chapter a man gets drunk at a fair and sells his wife to a sailor for five guineas! Yet this novel treats with profound sympathy the rise and fall of a tragically divided man. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre contains scenes that definitely stretch the reader’s credulity: what a spectacular coincidence that the very cottage doorstep upon which Jane collapses after her solitary journey from Thornfield belongs to her long-​lost cousins! But to dwell on the implausibility of that incident would completely miss the meaning of her quest for belonging, independence, and love. The first time I read Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) I was so unprepared for the revelations in Chapter 39, I think I actually gasped. As if Miss Havisham and her moldy bride-​cake with the spiders running through it were not incredible enough! But then everything falls heartbreakingly into place. Dickens’s intentions are served completely by his elaborate plotting. Indeed, like the hero, Pip, the reader must hold her assumptions at bay and wait patiently for the whole truth to emerge. The Victorian novel must entertain, of course. “The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing,” as Anthony Trollope insisted. But the novelist also “must teach whether he wish to teach or no” (Autobiography 201–​2). The novelist, says Trollope, and he could be speaking for the most serious and exacting Victorian writers, has a duty to “teach lessons of virtue and at the same time make himself a delight” to the reader (202). He must call upon us to pay attention to our vanities and foibles, to our moral blindness,

Plots  35 and to how conditions of wealth or poverty are sadly arranged in this worldly world. How must the novelist do his improving, honorable work? Certainly not by wearying readers with a sermon. You teach by charming readers, by seducing them with the storyteller’s oldest tricks, appealing to the elemental instincts of our ancient ancestors, men and women “gaping round the camp-​fire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense,” as E. M. Forster puts it, by keeping them wondering, “What would happen next?” (26). In other words, even the most high-​minded and morally conscientious novelist must appeal to the basic human craving to be swept up, spellbound, transfixed by a story. And the backbone of any story, its “organizing line” or its “thread of design,” according to the scholar Peter Brooks, is what we call The Plot (4). Narratologists tend to make a distinction between story and plot. Story is usually understood as a simple chronology of events: Jack and Jill fell down the hill. Plot is another layer of development, usually including description, cause-​and-​effect, motivation, explanation: Jack and Jill fell down the hill because someone poured petroleum on it overnight. Who? Why? Is it foul play? Sabotage? In fact, all stories probably have a kind of plot. Plot is a “constant of all written and oral narrative,” the “principle of interconnectedness and intention,” according to Brooks, who uses story and plot interchangeably, as did nineteenth-​century novelists (5). But then why have so many writers and literary critics been suspicious of plots, especially layered Victorian-​style plots? Why has plotting been viewed with such strong ambivalence? For a long time, it was thought that the addictiveness of plots distracted readers from intellectual concerns, from ideas, and also from unadulterated aesthetic values, “the pure realization of another world” or “the perfect identification of matter and form,” or “pure style,” or “organic unity.”4 In his essay, “What is Poetry?” from 1833, the philosopher John Stuart Mill ranked “the passion for a story, for almost any kind of story, merely as a story” with childish tastes, societies in “a rude state,” and human beings with “rude minds,” the “shallowest and emptiest,” the “most idle and frivolous” types of people who in their unfortunately low condition of development take more delight in a “fictitious narrative” than in the higher sphere of poetry (1046). When we read a story, we’re roped in through our base curiosity. Whodunnit? That, presumedly, is the be all and end all of plot. It was also thought that focusing on the plot erases aesthetic distance: readers who are encouraged to identify with the hero or heroine or to take sides with or against the characters will be rushing along to see what happens next instead of appreciating with detachment the author’s sentences, style, imagery, symbolism, metaphors, tone, and cunning manipulation of point of view. True art, including fiction (the argument goes, or went) should purge the reader of her emotional involvement and make space for disinterested contemplation and analysis. As Mill put it, the unsophisticated desire

36  Plots for “a story as a story” or “as a mere story,” for dose after dose of “actions and events” without intellectual or aesthetic discrimination, and especially without any depth of feeling, cheapens the literary experience. Basically, Mill demotes narrative as an aesthetic category, to the bottom rung–​–​even epics, ballads, and narrative paintings get taken down a notch. This is because a story “as a mere story” is a colossal distraction from the expression of higher feelings and the pursuit of truth, “the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion,” which are the concerns of great poetry (1046–​7). If the work is simply diverting, if it keeps the reader in suspense, offers surprises, revelations, and secret intrigues, if it centers on the extremes of a character’s feelings and relates a series of incredible adventures, it cannot belong to the highest rank of literary art. Reade’s A Terrible Temptation may leave you breathless, and Jane Eyre may keep your bedside candle burning well after midnight. But they’re still just pot-​boilers. Another reason thick plots were suspect is that they were so obviously artificial. Life does not provide plots, the reasoning goes, and shouldn’t literature be like life? (A debatable hypothesis I’ll return to later.) Why should a novelist be constrained by “some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last buttons on their coats in the fashion of the hour,” asked Virginia Woolf in 1925. “Is life like this? Must novels be like this?” (153–​4). Modernist authors such as James Joyce and Woolf, of course, could not eliminate entirely the “structuring operation” of the plot, its narrative logic, though they plotted, as Brooks contends, “with irony and bad conscience” (113). Yet the tyranny of the plot was not just a concern for modernists. Almost five decades before modernism’s intense reaction against Victorian fiction’s too-​ muchness, George Eliot wondered, “Why should a story not be told in the most irregular fashion that an author’s idiosyncrasy may prompt, provided that he gives us what we can enjoy?” To get to the truth about human life, Eliot thought, art requires freedom from the vulgar coercion of conventional plot, which is become hardly of higher influence on imaginative representation than a detailed order for a picture sent by a rich grocer to an eminent painter–​–​ allotting a certain portion of the canvas to a rural scene, another to a fashionable group, with a request for a murder in the middle distance, and a little comedy to relieve it. (Note Book 301–​2) It all sounds tediously formulaic. And yet the requirements of the “conventional plot” did not stop a great author like George Eliot from mixing seduction, murder, illegitimacy, adultery, blackmail, and courtroom drama into her novels in service to her moral vision. In fact, Eliot worked very

Plots  37 deliberately to have her interlacing plots reflect her moral vision–​–​something I’ll talk about later in this book. Eliot’s exasperation is a response to the fact that by mid-​century it seemed that the plots in Victorian novels were being constructed almost by blueprint, whipped up like the recipe for a Christmas pudding (search the Internet for “plot generator” and you will find that not much has changed). Indeed, in 1841, the comic magazine Punch published a series of “Literary Recipes” for a Fashionable Novel, a Historical Novel, a Startling Romance, etc. Here, for instance, is how to make a Sentimental Novel: Take a young lady—​dress her in blue ribbons—​sprinkle with innocence, spring flowers, and primroses. Procure a Baronet (a Lord if in season); if not, a depraved “younger son”—​trim him with écarté, rouge et noir, Epsom, Derby, and a slice of Crockford’s. Work up with rustic cottage, an aged father, blind mother, and little brothers and sisters in brown holland pinafores. Introduce mock abduction—​strong dose of virtue and repentance. Serve up with village church—​happy parent—​delighted daughter—​ reformed rake—​blissful brothers—​syren sisters—​and perfect denouement. N.B. Season with perspective christening and postponed epitaph.5 The fact that plots could be the object of this kind of droll parody as early as 1841 suggests that novelists were getting good at honing their products to narrow constituencies who wanted to read essentially the same story again and again, with minor variations. “The dear public would do well to reflect that they are often bored from the want of flexibility in their own minds,” George Eliot observed (Note Book 301). We are back again to the problem of the marketplace and the democratization of literature, supply meeting demand. Anthony Trollope did not think plots were his strong suit as a novelist, especially plots with a mystery at the center. “I have never been capable of constructing with complete success the intricacies of a plot that required to be unravelled,” he confessed (251). Yet he expressed only a grudging admiration for novelists who had a genius for making ingenious plots, writers such as Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins. “Of Wilkie Collins it is impossible for a true critic not to speak with admiration, because he has excelled all his contemporaries in a certain most difficult branch of his art,” writes Trollope, “but as it is a branch which I have not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural that his work should be very much lost upon me individually.” Trollope had a different writing process: When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary dove-​tailing which does not dove-​tail

38  Plots with absolute accuracy. The construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never lose the taste of the construction. The author seems always to be warning me to remember that something happened at exactly half-​past two o’clock on Tuesday morning; or that a woman disappeared from the road just fifteen yards beyond the fourth mile-​stone. One is constrained by mysteries and hemmed in by difficulties, knowing, however, that the mysteries will be made clear, and the difficulties overcome at the end of the third volume. Such work gives me no pleasure. (233–​4) Wilkie Collins’s link-​ by-​ link mode of storytelling, his little riddles, his skeletons in the cupboards, his teasers and enigmas are so very clever–​–​if you are someone who likes that sort of thing in a novel.6 Though he slights Collins (a little unfairly), Trollope was watchful of his contemporaries’ success because he knew two important things about writing novels. The first is that readers like an absorbing plot. The second is that anything else the novelist wants to say–​–​about people, society, politics, morality–​–​necessarily hangs on the success of the plot. Even if an author feels that the fine delineation of character should have priority in a novel (as did Trollope), the fact remains that a strong plot is the engine that drives everything else. I have always held the old-​fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character—​for this plain reason, that the effect produced by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. These remarks do not belong to Anthony Trollope. They are by, of all people, Wilkie Collins, from his 1861 Preface to The Woman in White (7). For despite their ostensible differences, both novelists recognized that once the reader’s attention is captured by the plot, other issues of more serious concern may be allowed to infiltrate the work. Compare Collins’s comments to Trollope’s reflection on the success of one of his best novels, Doctor Thorne (1858): The plot of Doctor Thorne is good, and I am led therefore led to suppose that a good plot,—​which, to my own feeling, is the most insignificant part of a tale,—​is that which will most raise it or most condemn it in the popular judgment… A novel should give a picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos. To make that picture worthy of attention, the canvas should be crowded with … created personages impregnated with traits of character which are known. To my thinking, the plot is but the vehicle for all this; and when you have the

Plots  39 vehicle without the passengers, a story of mystery in which the agents never spring to life, you have but a wooden show. There must, however, be a story. You must provide a vehicle of some sort. (115–​6) “I have always held the old-​fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story,” says Wilkie Collins. “Yes—​oh, dear, yes—​the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist,” writes E. M. Forster (44).7 Though more than sixty years apart, both novelists implicitly follow Aristotle’s observation that the action carries the meaning of a literary work. Even novelists concerned with minutely exploring characters’ psychology–​–​George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James–​–​know that the reader can only learn about those characters by seeing how they act under a particular set of circumstances. In an obituary tribute to Anthony Trollope, Henry James observed, Character, in any sense in which we can get at it, is action, and action is plot, and any plot which hangs together, even if it pretend to interest us only in the fashion of a Chinese puzzle, plays upon our emotion, our suspense, by means of personal references. We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are. (“Anthony Trollope” 177) George Eliot put the case explicitly in Chapter 6 of The Mill on the Floss: But you have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. “Character,” says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms,—​“character is destiny.” But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet’s having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity. (325) As Eliot’s narrative unfolds, Maggie’s dilemmas, like Hamlet’s, intensify because of what happens to her. Will she choose wisely? Will she be led astray? There are many possible outcomes for Eliot’s young heroine, each creating suspense and interest for the reader of The Mill on the Floss. How will she act? That is the question. In Aspects of the Novel, Forster declared that he disagreed with Aristotle and put down the importance of plots in the overall art of modern novel-​ writing. But Forster also noted that plots train our minds in powerful ways.

40  Plots Following a plot “demands intelligence and memory.” A reader making her way through a Victorian novel must be able to recall the specific contexts for all the choices a character has made and the impetus for a character’s deeds.8 This is an extremely important dimension of the plot, since memory is the key faculty in the capacity to perceive relations of beginnings, middles, and ends through time, both in books and in life (Brooks 11). “Memory and intelligence are closely connected, for unless we remember we cannot understand,” writes Forster. As the plot unfolds, the reader’s memory “will constantly rearrange and reconsider, seeing new clues, new chains of cause and effect” (87–​8). As it turns out, we do have to remember that something happened at exactly half-​past two o’clock on Tuesday morning for the plot of The Woman in White to make any sense, and not only because this novel has an especially intricate plot. Quiet reminders are sprinkled everywhere in Victorian fiction. “It will of course be remembered that Mary’s interview with the other girls at Greshamsbury took place some two or three days subsequently,” says the narrator of Doctor Thorne (106). “Arthur Donnithorne, you remember, is under an engagement with himself to go and see Mr. Irwine this Friday morning,” Eliot reminds us in Adam Bede (207). Victorian novelists are often obviously and self-​consciously shaping the plot in front of our eyes, building it up block by block, telling the reader to wait and see, intruding on the narrative with hints and asides, leaping ahead in time to reveal an event (prolepsis) or pausing the story to return to something in the past (analepsis). And a Victorian novel is almost always told in retrospect. The narrator is looking back at the doings of Arthur Donnithorne or Mary Thorne. Just as when we watch a movie, we read a Victorian novel knowing that we are not watching something that is happening, but something that has happened. Yet we pleasantly accept this weirdly “prophetic present,” in Gillian Beer’s phrase, and may even absorb it as one of our own memories (43). We remember certain incidents and mentally note hints that may prove relevant later, taking it on faith that we will be able causally to link this present we’re reading about now with the future that has already happened. We read the nineteenth-​century novel, offers Peter Brooks, “in a spirit of confidence, and also a state of dependence, that what remains to be read will restructure the provisional meanings of the already read” (23). To paraphrase the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, we must read the plot forward but can only understand it backward. Just as in life. There are periods in history when societies appear to have “an unquenchable thirst for plots,” says Brooks, “… and to seek the expression of central individual and collective meanings through narrative design” (5). In Europe, the nineteenth century was the golden age of plots, all kinds of plots, not only in fiction but in a range of disciplines, including history, philosophy, painting, and the natural sciences. This obsession with plots has sometimes been ascribed to the waning of religious faith. The biblical grand narrative

Plots  41 of previous centuries–​–​the creation and fall of humanity and the coming of Christ–​–​was losing ground to historicist perspectives on the Bible, what was known as The Higher Criticism. New discoveries by biologists, geologists, and anthropologists generated skepticism about Providential allegories of “a divine masterplot for human existence” (Brooks 141). It was beginning to be understood that human beings were part of a much longer and larger terrestrial story, and that human existence was only one measure in a vast and gradually unfolding temporal scheme, one that was not simple and linear, but which had many branches. New sets of questions reverberated throughout Victorian culture: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where do we think we’re going? Possibly these questions lie beneath the many mid-​Victorian plots centered around orphans, illegitimacy, inheritance, and hidden identities, as well as late-​ century gothic and science-​ fiction tales of mutating bodies and barbaric experiments gone awry, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Figure 2.1 The Tree of Life by Ernst Haeckel, from The Evolution of Man, 1879.

42  Plots Charles Darwin’s influence on his generation and the generation that followed was pervasive and profound. “Everyone found themselves living in a Darwinian world,” writes Gillian Beer (3), including Victorian novelists, whose minds and imaginations were undoubtedly swayed by evolutionary ideas. We can see the influence of Darwin on the novel thematically, especially after 1870, but it is also there at the level of organization. In his influential book, Darwin and the Novelists (1989), George Levine proposed several identifiable features of Darwinian thought detectable in Victorian novels. I would like to introduce them briefly in this chapter on plots, along with a few of my own condensed illustrations from nineteenth-​century fiction. First and central to Darwin’s theory is the idea that everything is potentially open to change and that nothing in existence can be truly understood without knowledge of its precedents. The nineteenth-​century novel reflects this changing world, and thus the moral necessity of adapting to change is often at the heart of the Victorian plot. Eliot’s presentation of Maggie Tulliver, the heroine of The Mill on the Floss, for instance, emphasizes that we can only know her if we understand her full history–​–​her family’s beginnings, her childhood, the struggles of growing up in St. Ogg’s as it was about forty years ago. Events in the past have a claim on the present and will almost certainly determine it. “If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie?” Maggie pleads. “We should have no law but the inclination of the moment” (385). Where twentieth-​century writers could dismiss with a character’s biography carte blanche and focus on half a year or even one day in a person’s life, Victorian novelists felt obligated to fill in all the gaps. A Victorian novel may begin with a full family history, going back a generation or two, before we’re introduced to the hero or heroine (Trollope did this often). And despite the tidy, wrap-​up endings where everything is explained, there is never absolute closure in Victorian narrative. The reader is invited to imagine the lives of the main characters continuing beyond the final chapter. Sometimes the last paragraph of the story is told in the present tense: “Dr. Thorne continues to extend his practice, to the great disgust of Dr. Fillgrave …” (624). Even a novel that ends with the deaths of its protagonists may evoke the future by inserting a member of the next generation in their place, or having a reminiscent observer stand by their graves in solemn reflection (see Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Wuthering Heights, and The Mill on the Floss). Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot’s first successful novel, commences in the year 1799 and includes an Epilogue that brings the reader up to the present, nine years later: It is near the end of June, in 1807. The workshops have been shut up half an hour or more in Adam Bede’s timber-​yard, which used to be Jonathan Burge’s, and the mellow evening light is falling on the pleasant house with the buff walls and the soft grey thatch, very much as it did when we saw Adam bringing in the keys on that June evening nine years ago. (49)

Plots  43 Everyone who is still alive in the story is moving forward in time. It feels appropriate, too, to circle back to Adam bringing in the keys, just as he used to do. The very last sentences of Adam Bede offer the reader a sense of immediacy, as people carry on with the established rhythms of ordinary life: “Why, there’s Mr. and Mrs. Poyser coming in at the yard gate,” said Seth. “So there is,” said Dinah. “Run, Lisbeth, run to meet Aunt Poyser. Come in, Adam, and rest; it has been a hard day for thee.” (584) Victorian novelists also liked to wind things up with the assurance that children will survive to determine England’s future, in what one critic has called “the genealogical imperative.”9 Many, many Victorian novels, including Adam Bede, end with children romping around the family hearth. All is in flux in the Darwinian plot, new generations carry on the work of their elders, and life, as it must, goes on. Another essential feature of evolutionary thinking is what Levine calls “blurring of boundaries.” In Darwin’s theory of evolution, species and varieties merge. Diversity is essential for survival. No living thing is perfected in isolation. In the famous conclusion to Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, with various insects flitting about … and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. (Darwin 174) Ecological and genealogical connections abound in life, as they do in the Victorian multi-​plot novel. “To discuss the life and nature of any organism requires discussion of the many others with whom it struggles, on whom it depends, in seemingly endless chains of connection,” explains Levine (Darwin and the Novelists 18). Victorian narratives make manifest this modern view of the world through their complex and intricately interwoven stories. Novels set in London, of course, are often teeming with many odd samples and breeds of humanity. But even a small village will have its peculiar types and specimens, all of them interdependent. These myriad connections, Levine says, rely on abundance: the overpopulated Victorian novel is the narrative equivalent of Darwin’s “endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful” (Darwin 174). The Darwinian narrative unfolds without design–​–​that is to say, evolution is self-​propelled according to “the laws acting around us,” in Darwin’s words. In the Victorian novel, the author is of course designing the plot. But what unfolds seems to happen by chance, as characters learn to adapt to unexpected circumstances and changing environments. Although there are

44  Plots many references to Providence in Victorian fiction, the explanations offered for human events in nineteenth-​century fiction are usually not metaphysical.10 Indeed, Victorian fiction intuits a very modern paradox, for even though we can often trace causes and effects quite clearly and confidently, it is undeniable that we are completely at the mercy of chance. In one sense, the world in a Victorian novel may be analyzed and accounted for, people’s behavior is psychologically explicable, and often quite probable when circumstances line up a certain way. At the same time, it is impossible to account for the inscrutable workings of Nature or fate. Something about the ways things unfold remains a mystery. In his writings, Darwin could not avoid acknowledging the role of luck or accident in the survival or extinction of species. Victorian novels thus abound in chance encounters and odd coincidences. Some reviewers, for example, criticized Dickens for the broad use of coincidence in his novels, but he defended himself. “On the coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life,” wrote John Forster, Dickens liked especially to dwell, and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly. The world, he would say, was so much smaller than we thought it; we were all so connected by fate without knowing it; people supposed to be far apart were so constantly elbowing each other; and to-​morrow bore so close a resemblance to nothing half so much as to yesterday. (113) In his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), Dickens’s narrator ponders “the mighty store of wonderful chains that are forever forging, day and night, in the vast iron-​works of time and circumstance” (169).11 It is true that sometimes coincidences, lost opportunities, and accidental encounters in a Victorian novel can feel heavy-​handed, or even cruel. Thomas Hardy, for instance, was sometimes accused of devising plots that punished his characters beyond their deserts, or of forcing his characters to acquiesce in the plot he had devised (E. M. Forster 93). A letter slips under a carpet: the recipient receives the truth too late, marital joy turns to misery. A stash of love letters falls into the wrong hands: a woman dies of shock and a man is ruined. A mother-​in-​law misinterprets a face seen in a window: she flees and perishes on a lonely heath, bitten by a venomous snake. Is there a pessimistic vision of life behind these kinds of accidents? Perhaps, although Hardy would never admit it (he called himself a “meliorist”). There is no heavenly being looking out for Tess Durbeyfield: In the ill-​judged execution of the well-​judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply “Here!” to a body’s cry of “Where?” till the hide-​and-​seek has become an irksome, outworn game. (Tess 43)

Plots  45 “Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble,” Hardy says in Jude the Obscure, “But nobody did come, because nobody does” (7). What meaning could there be in these seemingly random happenings and near misses? As religion lost its hold, the workings of chance in some Victorian novels took on a darker shade, deepening the sense of life’s precarity, even, for some authors (George Gissing comes to mind) life’s absurdity and futility. On the one hand, evolutionary theory brought undeniable evidence to bear on the origins of life on earth. On the other hand, the more scientists probed into the sheer variety of species, as well as the apparent randomness of their survival or extinction, the more apparent it became that human knowledge is extremely limited. How small our perspective must be, locked as we are into one millisecond of vast geological and biological time! Gillian Beer has suggested the plots of some of the greatest Victorian novels seem to externalize a disconcerting cultural conflict that would have been felt by many Victorians, even if they never studied with interest Origin of Species or The Descent of Man. There was, perhaps, a collective, subconscious desire for a new explanatory myth, for a determining set of primary, fixed natural laws that could work as a substitute for religious faith. Some kind of power or energy was still steering the world–​–​if not God, then something called “natural selection” or “punctuated equilibrium.” But this hope for order collided with an equally strong desire for a future that did not feel overdetermined by the laws of evolution, one that would be shaped by human agency. This conflict made for a “painful play of energies” in Victorian narrative, according to Beer, for the reader needs the authority of the novelist–​–​the confident, guiding voice of a narrator who controls the trajectory of events–​–​even while her imagination (and the novelist’s creativity) is absorbed in the open-​ended fates of characters who are presented with a series of choices and quandaries (Beer 150). In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot’s narrator quietly foreshadows the tragedy to come quite early in the novel. Maggie’s destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river; we only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the same final home. (325) The emotional heroine of The Mill on the Floss lives in a small provincial corner of the world, at a not particularly advanced moment in women’s struggles for equality–​–​she embodies the “conflict between the inward impulse and outward fact, which is the lot of every imaginative and passionate nature,” says Eliot (225). Her potential is larger than her environment allows. But even in such a narrow social sphere, Maggie has to make serious choices about her life. She is torn between her need for love, her responsibilities to others, her memories of home, her loyalty to the past. The reason we keep reading The Mill on the Floss is because Eliot has made Maggie’s struggle

46  Plots so real and so relevant and when misfortune comes, we care deeply what happens to her. In the previous chapter I mentioned the reviewer who faulted The Mill on the Floss because it had “no defined channel of action” and “no single plot.” George Eliot read Darwin and other scientific works deeply and thoughtfully. Perhaps she deliberately devised a plot that would evolve as her young characters evolved, not in a straight line, but compelled by “the laws of attraction,” the forces of growth, time, and change (Mill on the Floss 323). The plots of some Victorian novels do follow one character’s fictional journey in more or a less a straight line–​–​Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, for example, is a bit like that. Yet it is the endless variations on the single-​character, single-​plot structure that have come to define the nineteenth-​century novel. For some readers, as we saw in Chapter 1, juggling too many plots was artistically dubious–​–​recall Henry James’s “large, loose, baggy monsters.” For other readers, the funneling of those accidents and chance encounters into a unified plot is what gives the Victorian novel its flavor and energy. “Though the plot itself may require but few characters, it may be so enlarged as to find its full development in many,” offers Trollope. There may be subsidiary plots, which shall all tend to the elucidation of the main story, and which will take their places as part of one and the same work,—​as there may be many figures on a canvas which shall not to the spectator seem to form themselves into separate pictures. (Autobiography 217) No apologies from Trollope for either looseness or bagginess. Lots of characters and auxiliary plots are a perfectly sound principle upon which to build a novel. In fact, a novel may be better with secondary plots, as this creates more “character-​space.”12 There is plenty of room in the multi-​plot novel for different types of people, more chance encounters, more strange and curious specimens of human nature for the reader to scrutinize, contemplate, and judge. The absolute dominance of the multi-​plot novel in the nineteenth century, “with its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded lettering,” as Robert Louis Stevenson put it (180), as solid as one of the bricks in Mr. Mudie’s Circulating Library, is an incontestable cultural phenomenon. I want to return for a minute to that dubious hypothesis mentioned earlier that novels should be like life, or as Henry James put it in his essay, “The Art of Fiction,” in 1884, that novels should “compete with life” (195). To this proposition, Stevenson, author of such adventure tales as Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), offered a humble remonstrance. “Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant” (182). How, Stevenson asked, can fiction be like life, which is so frustratingly random, chaotic, and unfair? If you are a novelist, what to do? Should you try to capture it all comprehensively, or find a different method?

Plots  47 In a book about Victorian plots, the critic Robert Caserio observed that “a problem in fiction is a problem in life; a formal struggle in one is an intellectual and moral struggle in the other” (xiv). The problem in fiction that was being debated in the 1880s by writers including George Moore, H. G. Wells, James, and Stevenson was ostensibly about realism in fiction. But it was also a moral problem, almost a problem about how to live, or about how art helps us to live. A novelist can write a book that passively observes that nothing makes any sense, that we’re a cog in a machine, that’s there is no moral order anywhere, and nothing matters in the end. This was not the Victorian mindset! Patricia Drechsel Tobin has observed that for the Victorians, time and change were not catastrophic wild cards, but purposive and progressive elements “in a scheme of things, persons, and events” (35). The Victorians “discovered that to be living in time was no longer a fallen state, but rather the very field of action on which [to] win the twin trophies of earthly success and spiritual salvation” (35). More than the novels of other ages, the Victorian novel pays respectful homage to the real world that conceived it. The novels of Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Hardy, and James are mimetic monuments to an age in which clarity and scrupulousness were valued as highly as social and moral norms. This is a very high road to travel indeed, and those who trod it—​we like to think now, in our distance of safety—​were doomed to stumble. But the Victorians themselves were never foolishly anything, certainly not foolishly optimistic. They had eyes to see the center that could not hold. Still, even the harshest critics of the culture built their novels like the Rock of Gibraltar: the center might not hold, but the structure would. No matter how severe an indictment the novelist might bring against his real world, no matter how devastating a picture he might paint of social disintegration, his novel with its ordered progress in time offered a disproof of his vision of disorder. (36) Tobin notes that in the twentieth-​and twenty-​first centuries we are not so easily reassured against social chaos or philosophical confusion. “So we look back perhaps nostalgically to these heroes and heroines with their important origins and backgrounds, their fictional worlds prepared for their active engagement, their willful shaking of time to make it release a destiny” (37). Is it nostalgia? Or is it a tentative hope? The Victorian novel’s broad and various presentation of human action, of deeds that have moral outcomes and are undertaken with a moral purpose, imply a desire that, as bewildering as this world is, it is still intelligible. The implications and upheavals of Darwin’s scientific theories constituted a major intellectual struggle for people in the Victorian period, and we have seen how evolutionary thinking may have affected novelistic plotting. Another problem, just as pressing,

48  Plots involved changes in human relationships brought on by industrial capitalism. Victorian artists and intellectuals–​–​Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Dickens, Mill–​–​saw clearly that laissez-​faire capitalism was bent on replacing human values with commercial values. Each of these writers warned their contemporaries against the encroachment on human life of what they thought of as machinery. Machinery is anything that deadens the soul and displaces human growth and vitality, anything that turns a person into a commodity or a thing to be used. In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill wrote, Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. (87) The plots in Victorian novels meet Mill’s image of lives stretching in different directions, of branching out toward self-​discovery. One other idea about Victorian multi-​plot novels is worth mentioning here. To ensure stability and continuity within a democratic system, individuals must practice civic restraint, withhold judgments, and exercise intellectual caution. Caroline Levine has argued that the suspenseful and complex plots in a Victorian novel may serve as “rigorous political and epistemological training” for people in democratic societies, “a way to foster energetic skepticism and uncertainty rather than closure and complacency” (2). To unravel the plot, readers must consider alternative points of view and imagine unconventional outcomes. “Suspense is the experience by which readers learn to doubt their own convictions and approach the mysteries of alterity,” says Levine, and so suspenseful plotting “insists on testing authoritative claims to truth” (60–​1). The Victorian multi-​plot novel tells many stories all at once, and in so doing, it may have taught its original readers to see the world as a complicated intertwining of stories, each with its own reasons, motives, and urgencies. The trajectory of a character’s self-​discovery is essential to the plot in almost every Victorian realist novel. The reader’s interest in the story often hinges on whether the hero or heroine will come through adversity, or realize her mistakes, or in some way achieve happiness, in work or marriage or both. This has sometimes been identified as an expression of bourgeois individualism, the inscription of middle-​ class values about what constitutes “success” in modern life. Yet, placed within the frame of Victorian society, the pursuit-​of-​happiness plot may also be about something deeper. These types of plots are structured around the question of whether the protagonist will be allowed to live an authentic life (especially true for heroine-​centered plots). The twentieth-​century American critic Lionel Trilling has written that what virtually defined the nineteenth-​century novel was its “setting of the

Plots  49 values of moral and spiritual life over against the values of the world.” The novel was where ordinary people discovered, with pleasure and excitement, a deeper understanding of their moment in history and of themselves (Trilling 454). I will concede that it is quite fair to say that the engine that drives the plot of most Victorian novels is money. But the multi-​plot novel is dialogic and many-​voiced, and so it never resolves into a single, stable meaning. Alongside the heroine or hero’s drive to find worldly success or the right person to marry, there are always subplots and smaller dramas about the need for cooperation, sacrifice, and love. The plot of a Victorian novel is there to propel your interest, of course. It is also there to show society to you, to hold together different forms of consciousness, to unspool different life trajectories and different perspectives. The plot could be a weapon for addressing social problems (always, in Dickens) and for conveying grave truths about how modern people were living their lives. Indeed, scholars have targeted the cultural function of many different types of plots, from the financial plot, the fallen woman novel, the failed-​marriage plot, the bigamy plot, the conspiracy plot, and the personation plot. There has even been a study of the Victorian novel’s unwritten plots.13 Scholars like to ferret out these kinds of sub-​classifications. At the risk of being reductive, let’s say the plot of a Victorian novel goes something like this. At some time, someone made a choice. It may have been a big choice or a small one, but that choice, that deed, set into motion the uncoiling plot of the novel you are holding in your hands. Read back, and you will find a point of origin–​–​a marriage, a non-​marriage, a crime, a birth. Read on, and you will begin to see how that deed is shaping the present. Read further, and you will see how each human act has consequences beyond our knowledge, that interconnections flourish outside our vision, that there is a possible explanation, if not always a logical reason, for the course of these human affairs–​–​petty or strange or tragic as they may be. Given all that we see and read on our screens every day, and given how hard it is to make sense of so much of it, a plot in a Victorian novel arranged around the adventures of a poor governess, the social maneuvers of people in a provincial town, or the recovery of a stolen jewel do not threaten our equilibrium too much–​–​reading a story like that may even give us some psychological leverage, since we know all will turn out more or less well in the end. The plot of a Victorian novel asks for your sustained interest, your curiosity, and, yes, a certain narrative innocence, the suspension of your incredulity. And you can trust the plot in a Victorian novel, even if it’s deliberately tricky–​–​Victorian novelists would not pull the rug out from the reader á la Fight Club and tell you it never really happened (well, except for Lewis Carroll). A reader may securely follow the narrator of The Mill on the Floss to Dorlcote Mill “as it looked one February afternoon many years ago” (8). He will accept without skepticism that opium can make people commit crimes in their sleep, that a man may spontaneously combust, that an ardent and idealistic young woman would marry a boring old scholar,

50  Plots and that an unknown relative in the West Indies will leave the impoverished English heroine his entire fortune in his will. For though most of life is very boring, there are times when it is indeed exciting and unpredictable–​–​or at least it is in the wildly designing minds of many Victorian novelists. Spotlight Wilkie Collins, master-​plotter, is imputed to have written the first full-​length detective novel in English, The Moonstone, which ran in Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round from January to August 1868. We can credit Collins for introducing into English fiction some of the familiar tropes of the genre: the country house setting, the inept local cop, an eccentric detective, red herrings and false leads, the reconstruction of the crime, and the device of the least likely suspect. The Moonstone was a phenomenon when it was published, and it is still a great page-​turner. Like Collins’s earlier novel, The Woman in White, The Moonstone has multiple narrators whose epistolary testimonials piece together the mystery (more on multiple narrators in Chapter 5). The ingenious plot begins in 1799 in India, when John Herncastle steals a sacred Indian diamond called the Moonstone at the storming of Seringapatam. Jump ahead to the 1840s: the Moonstone has been left to Herncastle’s niece, Rachel Verinder, who wears it on her gown at her eighteenth birthday party. The next morning the Moonstone is discovered to be missing and Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard is called in to question the suspects. Collins introduces a range of sensational plot twists involving Indian jugglers who seek to recover the gem, a suicide by quicksand, and an experiment with laudanum that exposes the thief and eventually leads to his murder. The novel ends with a Postscript from the well-​travelled Anglo-​Indian, Mr. Murthwaite, who witnesses the return of the diamond to the Indian shrine: Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began. How it has found its way back to its wild native land—​by what accident, or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem, may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it in England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have lost sight of it for ever. So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell? (472) Did Collins want to leave the door open to a sequel? It is not out of the question. As we know, consumers can develop unquenchable appetites and addictions. In any case, the Victorian literary marketplace knew a hit when

Plots  51 it saw one. And so do we. In the twentieth-​and twenty-​first centuries, The Moonstone has been adapted in many languages for theater, television, film, and radio, as well as for YouTube videos and in graphic novels. Maybe at this very moment someone is sitting down to write a neo-​Victorian novel, or a piece of fan fiction, called The Moonstone Returns or The Moonstone Strikes Back. Who can tell? Notes 1 Victorian novelists, like the three Fates in classical mythology, were weavers of destinies. In his Preface to Little Dorrit, Dickens wrote, I have been occupied with this story, during many working hours of two years. … But, as it is not unreasonable to suppose that I may have held its threads with a more continuous attention than anyone else can have given them during its desultory publication, it is not unreasonable to ask that the weaving may be looked at in its completed state, and with the pattern finished. 2 “… in many respects the modern English novel, with its psychological intricacies and subjective language, begins with The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.” Stone, Novelists in a Changing World, p. 102. 3 On the other hand, Oscar Wilde said of Meredith, “His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story.” “The Decay of Lying,” p. 170. 4 See Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 89–​121. 5 Ecarté is a card game; rouge et noir refers to the roulette wheel; Epsom and Derby are fashionable racetracks; Crockford’s was a London gentleman’s club. All are shorthand for rakishness and gambling. 6 Trollope may have taken a hint from Wilkie Collins, though, in writing the plot for The Eustace Diamonds (1872), which began its serial run only a few months after the publication of The Moonstone. See Milley, “The Eustace Diamonds and The Moonstone.” In his Autobiography, Trollope wrote, The plot of the diamond necklace is, I think, well arranged, though it produced itself without any forethought. I had no idea of setting thieves after the bauble till I had got my heroine to bed in the inn at Carlisle; nor of the disappointment of the thieves, till Lizzie had been wakened in the morning with the news that her door had been broken open. All these things, and many more, Wilkie Collins would have arranged before with infinite labour, preparing things present so that they should fit in with things to come. I have gone on the very much easier plan of making everything as it comes fit in with what has gone before.

(314) 7 Forster cannot resist protesting a little at the need for a story: “That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different—​melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form.” Aspects of the Novel, p. 44.

52  Plots 8 Very astute readers may notice mysteries, gaps, and inconsistencies in the plots of some Victorian novels, as demonstrated in a series of entertaining literary puzzle books by John Sutherland from the 1990s, Is Heathcliff a Murderer?, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? 9 Patricia Drechsel Tobin’s influential Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative, was published in 1979. 10 A very fine recent study of the Victorian conception of Providence is Jennifer Gribble’s Dickens and the Bible: ‘What Providence Meant’. 11 Many have speculated about what Dickens had in mind for the plot of Drood. When he died on 9 June 1870, he left exactly half of the monthly installments unfinished. It’s clear he was trying something new in this work, and Drood is a tantalizing (half) novel. John Forster reports that Dickens told him the book was about “the murder of a nephew by his uncle; the originality of which was to consist in the review of the murderer’s career by himself at the close” (463). 12 The concept of character-​space is from Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many. 13 For example: Clayton Carlyle Tarr, Personation Plots: Identity Fraud in Victorian Sensation Fiction (2022); Maia McAleavey, The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel (2015); Rebecca Rainof, The Victorian Novel of Adulthood: Plots and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity (2015); Tamara S. Wagner, Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-​1901 (2010); Kelly Hager, Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-​ Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition (2010).

Works Cited Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-​Century Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 1961. University of Chicago Press, 1983. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Harvard University Press, 1984. Caserio, Robert L. Plot, Story, and the Novel: From Dickens and Poe to the Modern Period. Princeton University Press, 1979. Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. 1868. Penguin, 1998. —​—​—​. The Woman in White. 1854. Penguin, 2003. Darwin, Charles. “Origin of Species.” 1859. Darwin, edited by Philip Appleman, W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 95–​174. Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. 1870. Penguin, 1974. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. Penguin, 1985. —​—​—​. Essays and Leaves from a Note Book. William Blackwood and Sons, 1885. Accessed at GeorgeEliotArchive.org —​—​—​. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. W. W. Norton, 1994. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. Harcourt Brace, 1955. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. James R. Osgood & Company, 1875. Accessed at Project Gutenberg. Gribble, Jennifer. Dickens and the Bible: ‘What Providence Meant’. Routledge, 2021. Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. W. W. Norton, 1999. —​—​—​. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 1891. Penguin, 2003.

Plots  53 James, Henry. “Anthony Trollope.” 1883. The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Roger Gard, Penguin, 1987, pp. 174–​80. —​—​—​. “The Art of Fiction.” 1884. The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Roger Gard, Penguin, 1987, pp. 186–​206. Levine, Caroline. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt. University of Virginia Press, 2003. Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. University of Chicago Press, 1988. “Literary Recipes: How to Cook Up a Fashionable Novel.” Punch, no. 1 (August 7, 1841). Accessed at Project Gutenberg. Mill, John Stuart. “On Liberty.” Mill, edited by Alan Ryan, W. W. Norton, 1997, pp. 41–​131. —​—​—​. “What Is Poetry?” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by Carol T. Christ and Catherine Robson, eighth edition, vol. E, pp. 1044–​51. Milley, Henry James Wye. “The Eustace Diamonds and The Moonstone.” Studies in Philology, vol. 36, no. 4 (Oct. 1939), pp. 651–​3. Stevenson, Robert Louis. “A Humble Remonstrance.” 1884. Essays and Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Everyman’s Library, 1992, pp. 179–​88. Stone, Donald D. Novelists in a Changing World: Meredith, James, and the Transformation of English Fiction in the 1880s. Harvard University Press, 1972. Sutherland, John. Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? More Puzzles in Classic Fiction. Oxford University Press, 1997. —​—​—​. Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in Nineteenth-​century Fiction. Oxford University Press, 1996. —​—​—​. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1990. —​—​—​. Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? Further Puzzles in Classic Fiction. Oxford University Press, 1999. Tobin, Patricia Drechsel. Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative. 1979. Princeton University Press, 2015. Trilling, Lionel. “James Joyce in His Letters.” The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: Selected Essays, edited by Leon Wieseltier, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000, pp. 45–​76. Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. 1883. Penguin, 1993. —​—​—​. Doctor Thorne. 1858. Oxford University Press, 1980. Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” 1891. The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, edited by Linda Dowling, Penguin, 2001, pp. 163–​92. Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton University Press, 2003. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Common Reader, Harcourt Brace, 1925, pp. 150–​8.

3 Picturing

The Victorian novel overflows with descriptive writing. Nineteenth-​century writers lavished their attention on virtually everything they glimpsed, perceived, or imagined–​ –​ faces, bodies, hair, beards, jewelry, gestures, clothing, rooms, furniture, buildings, scenery, shops, horses, dogs, weather, trees, and almost every conceivable household object, from lanterns to ladles. Description features so strongly in the nineteenth-​century novel, Victorian writers even commented on what they were doing–​–​or not doing: Opposite to him sits his lady—​ a personage whom I might describe minutely, but I feel no vocation to the task. (Charlotte Brontë Shirley, Ch. XI) But have we any leisure for a description of Brighton? (William Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Ch. XXII) We shall endeavor to make this description as clear and unpedantic as possible. (Edward Bulwer-​Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, Ch. III) I quite feel that an apology is due for beginning a novel with two long dull chapters full of description. (Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne Ch. II) Sir George—​whom, by-​the-​bye, I have forgotten to describe. (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Ch. XVII) Add to this handful the thousands of variations in Victorian fiction on it would be hopeless to attempt to describe and we might conclude that Victorian novelists knew that efforts at realistic description can never fully reveal or accurately impersonate reality. And yet detailed description was part of their

DOI: 10.4324/9781003388401-4

Picturing  55 job. Pictorial description–​–​mental picture-​making–​–​was the tried-​and-​true method of getting at the world. Detail and description were the Victorian novelist’s first tools, almost the raison d' être for the novel in the nineteenth century and the bedrock of realism in art. Like everything else, description has a history. As the scholar Cynthia Wall explains, from classical rhetoric through to the Renaissance, description occupied a low status in literary culture. Description was seen as an afterthought, a bit of ornamentation, or else it was criticized for impeding or diluting the action of the narrative (Wall 7). Description was a frill, unnecessary and insignificant–​–​until sometime in the 1750s, when the long-​held suspicion of description as something that obstructed narrative gave way to broad acceptance, even respectability. Description gradually became absorbed into narrative–​–​in Defoe’s mapping out of London streets, in the gothic novel’s heavy reliance on atmospherics, and then later in Victorian realist fiction, where description became a solid part of the novel’s architecture (though it lost credibility again with the advent of modernism). There are a few different explanations for the amount and kinds of description in the Victorian novel. One theory rests on the fact that the novel was a late development in European culture. Compared to poetry and the drama, the novel “lacked the critical ‘rules’ and academic canons that stiffened the spine” of the fine arts (Meisel 52). In the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, novelists turned to more established models, such as the drama and painting, to create verbal pictures and set pieces, called tableaux, that would stimulate the reader’s visual imagination. Yet for most of the eighteenth century, particularity in art was not as highly valued as were the articulation of general truths that could evoke the sublime; ornamental “detailism” was considered effeminate, frilly.1 And in the early nineteenth century, literature was often understood as being akin to the visual arts: remember that before Dickens took over the serialization of The Pickwick Papers, it was the illustrator who got top billing. Indeed, sometimes the images accompanying the narrative were as memorable as the story itself, giving the whole reading experience an extra pictorial dimension. Henry James confessed that when he read Oliver Twist as a young boy, George Cruikshank’s haunting illustrations of the evil thief, Fagin, stayed with him more vividly than did Dickens’s writing (Small Boy 62). At the end of the last chapter, I referred to an influential essay by James called “The Art of Fiction” (1884), written in response to an article about realism in fiction by the critic Walter Besant. James provides us with one of the best-​known and most durable statements about the realist novel in the Victorian period: the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel–​–​the merit on which all its other merits … helplessly

56  Picturing and submissively depend. If it be not there they are all as nothing, and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life… . [I]t is here that he competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the color, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle. (195) For James, writers and painters should be concerned with rendering the world as solid, sharp, lucid, and apprehensible. Indeed, the ability to conjure “the air of reality” in both art and literature was the highest of all skills, sometimes seen even as a kind of clairvoyance.2 “With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-​ reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader,” writes George Eliot in the first Chapter of Adam Bede. “With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799” (49).3 Eliot’s conjuring trick is what J. Hillis Miller calls “good old-​fashioned mimetic realism, complete with circumstantial dates and places” (23). If the reader only believes in the time-​travelling illusion, she or he can enter the imaginary world of bygone Hayslope in the year 1799. Like magic! Adam Bede was the work that established George Eliot’s reputation. The novel is composed of rural sketches that seem to be modeled after nineteenth-​ century genre paintings–​–​though Eliot gives way to active narration when she must (Meisel 59). In a famous passage in Chapter 17, there is a digression in which Eliot elaborates on her admiration for seventeenth-​century Dutch paintings of humble life: do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-​worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-​house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-​beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world—​those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let Art always remind us of them. (224) For Eliot, the moral value of realist art is that it can bring before our eyes commonplace people and things, so they are made available as objects of reverence. Her art is entirely invested in opening the reader’s perceptive

Picturing  57 awareness to the simple fact that other people exist, and no matter their failings, their homeliness, or their poverty, they deserve our moral attention. Dickens’s realism has a similar motive. He wanted complacent readers to really see the apparently inconsequential people they might pass on the street every day: Jo, the illiterate crossing sweeper in Bleak House (1853), or Jenny Wren, the doll’s dressmaker with her bad back and queer legs in Our Mutual Friend (1865). In a huge metropolis such as Victorian London, very much human suffering is hidden from view. In Bleak House, when Mr. Snagsby, who runs a law-​stationer’s shop, visits some London slums with Inspector Bucket, he passes along the middle of a villainous street, undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water—​though the roads are dry elsewhere—​ and reeking with such smells and sights that he, who has lived in London all his life, can scarce believe his senses. Branching from this street and its heaps of ruins are other streets and courts so infamous that Mr. Snagsby sickens in body and mind and feels as if he were going every moment deeper down into the infernal gulf. (277) Dickens has a moral incentive for describing parts of London in odorous and disgusting detail. New technologies of seeing and various optical gadgetry may also have influenced descriptive practices in the novel.4 Panoramas and Dioramas were enormously popular forms of entertainment in the mid-​nineteenth century. Spectators would sit in a special room at the center of a circular painting, having to turn 360 degrees to take in the whole thing (in a Diorama, lights in front and behind a painted screen added change and movement). The Panorama was comprehensive, showing the audience not a “segment of a world, but of a world entire seen from a focal height,” so that many layers of society were made visible: viewers were offered a strong illusion of both immediacy and scope (Meisel 62). Just as some twentieth-​century novelists were influenced by the techniques of cinema, Victorian novelists, dramatists, and artists exploited the panoramic structure to represent in detail the diversity of modern life. Some historians of the novel believe that the shift toward more descriptive writing came about because British society just had more material objects to describe. As Wall says, there developed “a new awareness of and accessibility to a rather sudden large intake of new things” into people’s lives (151). The effects of the industrial revolution and the expansion of the British Empire across three fourths of the globe saturated nineteenth-​century Britain with objects as never before in recorded history. Commercial commodities and the spoils of imperialism flooded the everyday world, from the calico curtains woven in the textile mills of Manchester to tobacco imported from the West Indies. More than any preceding generation, the Victorians lived in “a world of goods” and an “empire of things” (Wall 151).

58  Picturing The Victorian novelist’s devotion to objects and details was shared by visual artists. Detailed, realistic narrative paintings of contemporary life were in vogue throughout the nineteenth century, and Victorians loved to figure out the story implicit in works by Ford Madox Brown, William Holman Hunt, Augustus Egg, Abraham Solomon, and other painters. These artists reflected and modeled the descriptive strategies of Victorian novelists, usually with a moralizing undertone. Just as in a novel, a detail such as a young lady’s dropped glove or a gentleman’s rumpled newspaper could signal a troubled love story or a tale of financial woe. Everything carried potential meaning in the enclosed narrative space of the painting, and piecing together the details in a picture was part of its pleasure for Victorian spectators. The painter William Powell Frith channeled the Victorian passion for realistic treatments of modern everyday life. Huge paintings such as The Railway Station (1862), Ramsgate Sands (1851–​ 54), and The Derby Day (1856–​58), were stories intended to be “read,” as the viewer’s eye moves across the painting (more than seven feet horizontally) to different interlocking episodes and characters. The Derby Day, for example, describes a summer afternoon at Epsom, a popular racetrack outside of London, and displays with joyful profusion and variety the spectacle of people from all walks of life out for a day of amusement. The separate groupings in the painting–​ –​ acrobats, gamblers, flirtatious couples, families, mendicants–​ –​ seem to have their own mini-​narratives. Indeed, there is so much to see in The Derby Day that when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858, authorities had to install a rail in front of it to keep order among the crowds of spectators.5 This brave new world of stuff and more stuff was paraded for all to see in London’s Hyde Park from May to October 1851 during The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, symbol of Britain’s industrial wealth and a banner of progress. More than 25,000 tickets were secured by members of the public for opening day alone, and Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace was the wonder of the modern world, a giant glass-​and-​steel greenhouse for displaying a bizarre agglomeration of objects both spectacular and mundane, from pie-​tins and barrels of oats to monster-​sized telescopes, American sewing machines, and flushing toilets (the most popular exhibit by far). For Charlotte Brontë, the wonder of the Great Exhibition consisted in a “grandeur [that] does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things” (Freedgood 143). Not everyone was thrilled. “I find I am ‘used up’ by the Exhibition,” Dickens wrote in 1851. “I don’t say ‘there’s nothing in it’–​–​there’s too much. … So many things bewildered me” (Selected Letters 234). Nevertheless, the enormous success of the Exhibition pointed to “the extent to which Victorians liked to look at things, any and seemingly all things” (Freedgood 143). The Great Exhibition, like the Victorian novel and Frith’s paintings, gave spectators the impression that it was possible to put almost everything on display, that everything could be seen. Yet I think we would all agree that looking at a thing is not the same as seeing it. “The first

Picturing  59 great mistake that people make in the matter,” John Ruskin wrote in 1843, “is the supposition that they must see a thing if it be before their eyes” (51). What does it mean to really see something? And how does an artist, whether in words or in paint, successfully represent what she or he sees? John Ruskin was the first modern art critic. In his five-​volume examination of realism in art, Modern Painters (1843–​60), Ruskin was interested in the truthfulness of modern painting, for he believed truth to nature to be the first measure of artistic greatness. Ruskin argued that what we see is colored by what we already know about the world around us. For example, when we look at a view of the woods in autumn or of a storm at sea, we don’t see much of anything closely or in detail. We see a medley of colored patches, and our brain fills in the rest because of what we know about the woods or the sea. A painter who creates a landscape that minutely reproduces every leaf in a tree is not being truthful, then, for the naked eye cannot take in every leaf, let alone its stems and veins and variations in shape. The artist who is determined to represent reality microscopically, says Ruskin, will fail in truthfulness “as the Daguerreotype does, from over-​fidelity; for foliage will not be imitated, it must be reasoned out and suggested” (407). Ruskin felt it was more truthful in the painter to suggest the leaves than to try to pretend to see what the human eye cannot. An artist should go to nature with love, earnestness, and humility–​–​these are the emotions that raise the “human mind … above that of the Daguerreotype or Calotype, or any other mechanical means that ever have been or may be invented” (77). Ruskin, at only the age of twenty-​four, anticipated the groundbreaking ideas of the Impressionists, of Monet, Manet, Degas, and Whistler, painters who would radically reimagine forms of realistic representation in modern art. The Daguerreotype was an early form of photography that relied on copper plates. William Henry Fox Talbot built on this early technology to develop what he called the Calotype, which used a paper negative that could make multiple positive prints. Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature was the first book of photographs to be commercially published in Europe, appearing in six fascicles between June 1844 and April 1846. Talbot’s contemporaries, in the linked Victorian universes of art, industry, and science, were amazed by these pictures. For many people, it was the first time they had ever seen a photograph. A reviewer in the Athenaeum (22 February 1845) called The Pencil of Nature, “a wonderful illustration of modern necromancy.” The Literary Gazette praised “Mr. Talbot’s perseverance and clairvoyance.” Talbot himself felt there was something almost occult behind his discovery. He was seizing time, making life stop just long enough for our inspection. He was employed in what he called poetically “The Art of Fixing a Shadow.” “The phenomenon I have now briefly mentioned appears to me to partake of the character of the marvellous,” Talbot confessed, “almost as much as any fact which physical investigation has yet brought to our knowledge” (“Account”). Talbot aimed his camera at ordinary things around his estate: a mound of wheat, a ladder leaning against a wall, the fronds of a fern, a piece

60  Picturing of lace (printed as a negative because “the small delicate threads which compose the lace would not be quite so sharp and distinct” in the positive [56]). Talbot was ebullient. “One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art,” he wrote, “will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to copy faithfully from nature” (33). Ruskin and Talbot present us with two intertwining conceptions of visual representation, the factual and the impressionist, the documentary and the dreamlike. The productive tensions between these perspectives, between objective and subjective ways of seeing, drove description in the Victorian novel, and together created an aura of “realism.” In many eighteenth-​century novels, the inventory of objects, décor, clothing, and interior space was like something you might find in an auctioneer’s catalogue. By the mid-​1800s, though, description was more textured, and greater attention was paid to ordinary, everyday things. Descriptions also felt more intimate, taking on a potentially symbolic or evocative meanings. In Charlotte Brontë’s description of the Red Room in Jane Eyre, there are red damask curtains and walls “a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink” (17); Dickens’s description of Miss Havisham’s room in Great Expectations notes the “wintry branches of candles on the high chimney piece” (84); Eliot’s descriptions of Dorothea’s blue and green boudoir in Middlemarch always mentions the pale stag in the tapestry and the “delicately touched miniatures” (232). Everything is noted, the objects are solid and real, the descriptions careful and detailed. At the same time, they suggest something dreamy and intangible about a character’s emotional state or inner world. Remove the descriptions of these rooms, and something in the imaginary world of the novel would be fundamentally different. They function as much more than setting or background. In Chapter 16 of Brontë’s Villette (1853), the heroine Lucy Snowe awakens from a swoon. She feels she must be dreaming because the objects in the room seem so eerily like those she remembers in her godmother’s house at Bretton. She sees the blue arm-​chair, the scroll-​couch, “the round centre-​table, with a blue-​covering, bordered with autumn-​tinted foliage,” the “two little footstools with worked covers, and a small ebony-​framed chair, of which the seat and back were also worked with groups of brilliant flowers on a dark ground,” two oval miniatures of women wearing lace sleeve-​ruffles with pearls around their foreheads and white throats encircled in velvet, the two china vases, the alabaster ornaments preserved under glass. Of all these things I could have told the peculiarities, numbered the flaws or cracks, like any clairvoyante. Above all, there was a pair of handscreens, with elaborate pencil-​drawings finished like line engravings; these, my very eyes ached at beholding again, recalling hours when they had followed,

Picturing  61 stroke by stroke and touch by touch, a tedious, feeble, finical, school-​girl pencil held in these fingers, now so skeleton-​like. (186–​7) Lucy is, indeed, back at Bretton. She has been brought there, barely conscious, by Dr. John, and all the things she names are concretely there. Yet in the way she processes what she beholds, we understand that these objects have become so integrated into her early life they are almost a part of her, repositories of concentrated emotion–​–​they seem to represent everything she once desired, and everything she has lost. This kind of evocative description, in which things and rooms function psychologically in the story, was rare before the mid-​nineteenth century. Of course, not all Victorian novelists used description in this way. Many writers described stuff matter-​of-​factly, as if they were displaying their credentials: let me document for you what I have seen and where I have been and what I know (the photographic impulse). If you are describing the furniture in a room or a woman’s dress, why stop with the carvings on the mahogany fireplace or the cherry-​colored voile ribbons? Roland Barthes writes, “nothing could indicate why [a novelist] should halt the details of the description here and not there.” The realist novel is governed by an aesthetic of accuracy. Where do you set the limit? There will “always be a corner, a detail, an inflection of space or color to report” (Barthes 145). Here is a slightly abridged paragraph from Book 2, Chapter 1 of Benjamin Disraeli’s Condition of England novel, Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845). See what rises to the mind’s eye as you read: The building which was still called MARNEY ABBEY, though remote from the site of the ancient monastery, was an extensive structure raised at the latter end of the reign of James the First, and in the stately and picturesque style of that age. Placed on a noble elevation in the centre of an extensive and well wooded park, it presented a front with two projecting wings of equal dimensions with the centre, so that the form of the building was that of a quadrangle, less one of its sides. Its ancient lattices had been removed, and the present windows though convenient accorded little with the structure; the old entrance door in the centre of the building however still remained, a wondrous specimen of fantastic carving: Ionic columns of black oak, with a profusion of fruits and flowers, and heads of stags and sylvans. The whole of the building was crowned with a considerable pediment of what seemed at the first glance fanciful open work, but which examined more nearly offered in gigantic letters the motto of the house of Marney. The portal opened to a hall, such as is now rarely found; with the dais, the screen, the gallery, and the buttery-​hatch all perfect, and all of carved black oak. … [T]‌he grand gallery of the seventeenth century was still preserved, and was used on great occasions as the chief reception-​room.

62  Picturing You ascended the principal staircase to reach it through a long corridor. It occupied the whole length of one of the wings; was one hundred feet long, and forty-​five feet broad, its walls hung with a collection of choice pictures rich in history; while the Axminster carpets, the cabinets, carved tables, and variety of easy chairs, ingeniously grouped, imparted even to this palatian chamber a lively and habitable air. (69–​70) Did you skip? I cannot say I blame you. There is a lot here to tax the imagination. I think I can picture the hall and the carved black oak. But I can’t quite see the “ingeniously grouped” easy chairs. And did Disraeli really need to pace off the square footage? I know I am stretching your patience with these lengthy (boring?) passages of description, but it is to illustrate the various techniques Victorian writers employed to create the illusion of reality, with greater or lesser success. Like an establishing shot in a film, the opening description in a Victorian novel–​ –​showing the reader a place or a person–​–​sets the stage for the action of the story. And just like watching a film, the reader enters a Victorian novel with his or her visual apparatus. Consider the opening sentences from three novels published before 1815: Mrs. Stanhope, a well-​bred woman, accomplished in that branch of knowledge which is called the art of rising in the world, had, with but a small fortune, contrived to live in the highest company. About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. It is, then, sixty years since Edward Waverley, the hero of the following pages, took leave of his family, to join the regiment of dragoons in which he had lately obtained a commission.6 There is nothing wrong with beginning a novel with an explanation of events that occurred prior to the tale proper. Victorian novelists did this, too. But they also wanted the freedom to experiment, to play around with that formula in ways that would bring the reader immediately into the story. She stood on the platform watching the receding train. A few bushes hid the curve of the line; the white vapour rose above them, evaporating in the pale evening. A moment more and the last carriage would pass out of sight. The white gates swung forward slowly and closed over the line. (1) This is the first sentence of Esther Waters, published in 1894 by the Irish writer George Moore (I mentioned him in Chapter 1). Its painterliness signals

Picturing  63 a radical departure from early-​and mid-​century description, as does the novel’s subject matter–​–​Esther is not the typical mid-​Victorian fallen woman, and Moore’s treatment of her is naturalistic, truthful, and without sentimentality. Quite beautifully, Moore reprises the opening portrait almost word for word at the end of the novel, after eighteen years have passed, “eighteen years of labour, suffering, and disappointment. A great deal had happened, so much that she could not remember it all” (311). Compare Moore’s writing to the opening sentences in another novel about a fallen woman, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891): On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-​aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg-​basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly parson astride on a gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune. (1) Notice all the data in this short paragraph: the time of year, the time of day, the locale, the approximate age of the man, his physical mien, his social class. There is the added detail of the empty egg-​basket and the patch on the hat from being worn away at the brim where the man’s thumb touches it (a fine-​grained observation). The reader can perhaps guess at the man’s state of mind, too. Is he not a little pleased with himself and perhaps a little tipsy? Hardy begins Tess of the D’Urbervilles in medias res: a man on a road meets another man. Neither will be the novel’s main character, but the wheels have been put in motion. Hardy’s rich and colored showing of the encounter sets the scene and gets the reader’s picturing mind working. Some Victorian novelists like to be very faithful to a certain locality–​–​ Hardy certainly did. He was meticulous about the geography of southwest England in the series of books known as the Wessex novels, and even made detailed maps to accompany his stories. Urban novelists could be even more meticulous. Dickens and George Gissing, for instance, always make their characters live in specific London streets and neighborhoods and travel specific routes. “On the impulse, she rushed away, out of Clerkenwell Close, up St. John Street Road, across City Road, down to Hanover Street, literally running for most of the time” (360) is a typical Gissing passage from an early novel, The Nether World (1889). Dickens, of course, knew London thoroughly, but the difference between a description of London by Dickens and one by Gissing will be obvious to anyone who cares to compare them–​–​ if you want an impressionistic image of utter stagnation, read the opening chapter of Bleak House. Or take Dickens’s description of Arthur Clennam’s

64  Picturing return to London after twenty years in China, from Chapter 3 of Little Dorrit: He crossed by St Paul’s and went down, at a long angle, almost to the water’s edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some obsolete Worshipful Company, now the illuminated windows of a Congregationless Church that seemed to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and discover its history; passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little bill, FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the house he sought. (70) “Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up” (67). London is saturated with Arthur Clennam’s loneliness and depression–​ –​ though Dickens cannot resist inserting his own anti-​Sabbatarian opinions, as well. Even the Sunday church bells at the opening of the chapter seem like melancholy dirges, “throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-​carts were going round” (67). Gissing’s London is like a detailed map–​–​it is a very accurate map, but it doesn’t help the reader to see and feel and hear the whole atmosphere of London. As Peter Mendelsund notes, mapping is not exactly picturing, “not in the sense of re-​creating the world as it appears to us, visually” (229). In comparison, Dickens’s metropolis is so vividly felt and experienced that his account of the city “slips imperceptibly from realism to expressionism” (Irwin 156). If you do not know London well, a novelist’s precise directions may not mean very much to you. As an American, when I read Victorian literature, or really any fiction set in the United Kingdom or Ireland, I just take it on faith that these places are plausibly represented. My suggestion is to not let the strangeness of the past or the foreignness of the landscape get in the way of your picturing mind. After all, the Victorian novelist’s aim is not always to produce a faithful record of what he has imagined or seen or what he knows for a fact. His ambition is to stimulate the reader to visualize intensely for herself all that he has taken the pains to describe. This indeed is how we read fiction, through the mysterious process of visualization and co-​creation with the author’s imagination.7 In Art and Illusion, a famous study of perception published in 1960, the art historian Ernst Gombrich backs up Ruskin in suggesting that an exhaustively detailed painting is actually false to the psychology of human perception. In real life, no one will see every hair on a person’s head or all the features in a person’s face. “Perception,” Gombrich writes, “is always an active process, conditioned by our expectations and adapted to situations. Instead of talking of seeing and knowing, we might do better to talk of seeing and noticing. We

Picturing  65 notice only when we look for something, and we look when our attention is aroused by some disequilibrium, a difference between our expectation and the incoming message. We cannot take in all we see in a room, but we notice if something is changed. We cannot register all the features of a head, and as long as they conform to our expectations they fall silently into the slot of our perceptive apparatus” (148). Gombrich’s observation may apply to description in literature, as well. A writer can only create an illusion of reality by providing enough details to persuade the reader or spectator to fill out the rest of the picture. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), for example, Hyde’s face is never described, and no one is capable of saying what he looks like beyond having a vague “deformity.” Henry James wrote of his great novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898), Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough … and his own experience, his own imagination … will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. (Art of the Novel 176) In fact, a painting or narrative with too many details may hinder our mental illusion-​making, first because it discourages the reader’s participation–​–​the imagination doesn’t have enough to do–​–​and second because in a linear narrative, when a description goes on for several pages or is cluttered with details, the reader is less likely to fuse everything into a single image. Many of my students complain that description slows them down when they’re trying to get through a long Victorian novel (although some love it). I concede that, in their commitment to accuracy–​–​photography again–​–​ Victorian novelists can overdo it. “And now I will speak of the Great House of Allington,” says Trollope’s narrator in the opening chapter of The Small House at Allington (1864), and in 1,750 words walks the reader through the house’s architectural details, then we see the gardens, next is the view from the churchyard, then “in the fewest possible number of words,” we are shown the church itself (outside and inside), then the vicarage and the road leading to the village, past the Red Lion Inn, the post office, and a narrow wooden bridge, until we finally wind our way to Allington Street, which “as I have said, turns short round towards the church at this point, and there ends at a white gate, leading into the churchyard by a second entrance,” and around a bend we see “a pretty low iron railing with a gate, and with a covered way, which leads up to the front door of the house which stands there” (5–​9). We have arrived at the Small House at Allington. Finally. A reader could be forgiven for being confused by Trollope’s directions. Michael Irwin drolly remarks that Trollope plays with his pretend landscapes “as a child might play with a clockwork train or a toy farm”–​–​it’s more fun if you can make the church door have a little knocker or give the train a red caboose (144). Trollope is not among those Victorian novelists who stuff their books with descriptions of curtain rings, flowerpots, canes, cloaks, and roast mutton

66  Picturing with mint sauce, but he does like his towns and villages, and he was quite proud of the fact that he knew his fictional county of Barset so completely. “I had it all in my mind,” he wrote, “—​its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes, its members of Parliament, and the different hunts which rode over it, I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches” (Autobiography 140). Still, Trollope’s punctiliousness can sometimes feel a little taxing. But make no mistake, written description requires great technical skill and sensitivity. It is the art of knowing what to include to help your reader form a picture in her mind, what to suggest so she can fill in the gaps with her imagination, and what to exclude so she does not become tired or confused. The Victorian novelist also must decide when to merge static description with narration, because you cannot have a novel that is all description, with no plot and no action (though some have tried). If description seems to be only a backdrop, it can feel artificial and, like Disraeli’s description of MARNEY ABBEY, runs the risk of being skipped over. But a good description can feel alive and fluid, roving and wondering, especially when it is used to explore perspective–​–​who is seeing, and from what vantage point–​–​in a proto-​cinematic way. Thomas Hardy does this all the time. Instead of directly narrating a scene, the reader sees it being seen, as it is routed through one particular spectator or even from a bird’s eye view: who is seeing Tess as she stands still “upon the hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-​table of indefinite length”? (105). Study this amazing description of Tess and Marian working the muddy fields at Flintcomb-​Ash: The swede-​field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets—​the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of each turnip had been eaten off by the live-​stock, and it was the business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also. Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies. (285) Hardy displays his agricultural knowledge by mentioning the acreage, the lanchets or lynchets and siliceous veins, the chalk, the oddly shaped flints,

Picturing  67 the half-​eaten turnips, the hooked fork called a hacker. But when he offers an image of the field as a brown featureless face reflected in a white featureless sky, we are seeing the scene from far away, impressionistically–​–​and Hardy was quite interested in impressionism, noting in his journal, The impressionist school is strong. It is even more suggestive in the direction of literature than in that of art … the principle is, as I understand it, that what you carry away with you from a scene is the true feature to grasp. (F. E. Hardy Life 184) In the description of Tess and Marian at Flintcomb-​Ash, the reader is meant to grasp the women’s dismal insignificance: they are two dark smudges in a desolate impressionist landscape, alienated and alone. Hardy also uses description to make space in his fiction for lyricism and a linguistic playfulness not usually associated with realist novels concerned with social issues. Hardy’s relentlessly tragic plots may be difficult for some readers to take, but his rare and intimate eye offers many pleasures. He sees both the weirdness and the beauty of the natural world and finds striking metaphors to describe it. In The Woodlanders (1887), nature is almost sensate. “Sometimes a bough from an adjoining tree was swayed so low as to smite the roof in the manner of a gigantic hand smiting the mouth of an adversary, to be followed by a trickle of rain, as blood from the wound” (308); “On older trees … huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs” (52). In The Return of the Native (1878), a “long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white” bisects the “vast dark surface [of Egdon Heath] like the parting-​line on a head of raven hair” (13). In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), the town of Casterbridge stands “clean-​cut and distinct, like a chess-​board on a green tablecloth” (70). The fresh harrow-​lines in Farmer Troutham’s field in Jude the Obscure (1895) “seemed to stretch like the channellings in a piece of new corduroy” (14). In Tess, Jupiter hangs in the night sky “like a full-​blown daffodil, so bright as almost to throw a shade” (347). Herons flying out from the boughs of trees make “a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters” (131). As Tess and Angel Clare walk nearby, the birds move their heads around “in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets by clockwork” (131). William Cohen has noted that critics generally see the non-​narrative, “boring” parts of Hardy’s novels (his word) as instances of his poetry (6, n.11). And indeed, for some readers, these sections have philosophical priority over plot and character for what they reveal about our capacity for beholding nature with all our senses–​–​or what they suggest about our blindness to the texture, taste, and smell of this solid and abundant world. Details, details. Moreen curtains, shining broadcloth, barouches, baize doors, wax-​ended canes, Turkish trousers, and a set of tea things in delft. What is a barouche or a baize door, anyway? And do you really need all of

68  Picturing it? What should you do with this plethora of detail when you’re reading a Victorian novel? Victorian novelists are happy to pile on seemingly superfluous descriptions even if they are not essential to the story. How do we discern when we can skim over a long passage of description, and when we should be alert to every nuance? It would impoverish your reading of any Victorian novel if you got into the habit of jumping over descriptive passages. On the other hand, no one can see a novel all at once, and in long Victorian novels different details will stand out to different readers. The critic Louise Rosenblatt calls this “selective attention”: some features of a text will “have a sharp impact, others will be glossed over or stay on the outer fringes of consciousness” (25, 167). So, the best practice is simply to notice what you notice. Maybe a part of your mind registers that Tess is the only maiden with a red ribbon in her hair, or you like Miss Murdstone’s steel-​clasped reticule that shuts like a bite, or you perceive that Madame Beck’s auburn hair is notably unmixed with any gray. These are small details, perhaps, but they are deliberately singled out by the author as clues to these characters’ dispositions or their fate, and a good reader will make a mental or marginal note of them. As Nabokov said, “In reading, one should notice and fondle details” (1). But what about descriptive clutter or the apparently random detail? There is no one more strongly associated with excessive detail than Dickens. The word clairvoyance has come up a few times in this chapter, but Dickens really did seem to have possessed an almost mystical perceptiveness. George Henry Lewes, in an essay from 1872, called Dickens “a seer of visions.” His ability to mentally assimilate what he saw struck Lewes as almost pathological, for “in no other perfectly sane mind … have I observed a vividness of imagination approaching so closely to hallucination.” When he imagined a street, a house, a room, a figure, he saw it not in the vague schematic way of ordinary imagination, but in the sharp definition of actual perception, all the salient details obtruding themselves on his attention. He, seeing it thus vividly, made us also see it; and believing in its reality, however fantastic, he communicated something of his belief to us. (147) In a letter to John Forster, Dickens confessed that the creative process felt occult even to himself: “some beneficent power shows it all to me, and tempts me to be interested, and I don’t invent it–​–​really do not–​–b ​ ut see it, and write it down” (Selected Letters 90). When he was planning out a novel, Dickens habitually used the term picture to cue his imagination. The number plans for Little Dorrit include such remarks as, “The Factory—​Picture,” “Park Lane Picture. Evening,” “Open with old Pauper out for the day–​–​ Picture.” His working plans for Hard Times (1854) include terms that evoke the theater: “separation scene,” “The great effect,” “Mill Pictures,” “Wet

Picturing  69 night picture,” “moving picture of Stephen going away from Coketown” (Meisel 60). The specific type of pictorialism in Dickens can be hard to construe because he seems to have absorbed it all–​–​the panorama, theater, painting, tableau, and even the camera. Dickens compared his mind to “a sort of capitally prepared and highly sensitive [photographic] plate” that receives exact impressions of what it takes in (Selected Letters xi). George Orwell remarked that the “outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail,” offering an example from Dickens’s earliest work, The Pickwick Papers: “A few days afterwards, the family were at dinner–​–​baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it –​–​the child, who wasn’t hungry, was playing about the room, when suddenly…” The mutton and potatoes, Orwell says, are totally superfluous, a “florid little squiggle” that somehow determines that special Dickens atmosphere (92). Let’s take a moment to look at an unnecessary detail from a much later work. Our Mutual Friend (1865) is a novel thematically concerned with money, materiality, and mounds of waste. It is bursting at the seams with extraneous detritus and debris. In Book 1, Chapter 7, Silas Wegg stumps along on his wooden leg toward Clerkenwell in a district of “the poorer shops of small retail traders … and of Italian frame-​makers, and of barbers, and of brokers, and of dealers in dogs and singing-​birds” (83). From these, Mr. Wegg selects one dark shop-​window with a tallow candle dimly burning in it, surrounded by a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick, but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct, save the candle itself in its old tin candlestick, and two preserved frogs fighting a small-​sword duel. Stumping with fresh vigour, he goes in at the dark greasy entry, pushes a little greasy dark reluctant side-​door, and follows the door into the little dark greasy shop. It is so dark that nothing can be made out in it, over a little counter, but another tallow candle in another old tin candlestick, close to the face of a man stooping low in a chair. (83) There is a lot of dark and greasy in this description, and a lot of tallow candles. That’s Dickens, he likes to lay it on thick. But do we need the preserved frogs? Well, on the one hand, yes, as this is Mr. Venus’s taxidermy shop, and such a shop might very well have such an object on display (everything else in the window is indistinct). Do we get the idea without the frogs? Pretty much. They do not advance the story and they are not used symbolically, as far as I can tell. But they are there when Wegg and the reader first visit Mr. Venus’s shop in the second monthly number, June 1864, and they are there three more times, as well.8 In a long, serialized novel, part of the novelist’s authority

70  Picturing “derives from his ability to establish that the characters and settings he has imagined have definition and permanence in his own mind” (Irwin 5). Those frogs have been clearly present to Dickens from the second monthly installment to the last, and though our modern eyes may float over them, maybe they had special meaning for Victorian readers. The Victorians were keenly interested in biology, anatomy, and natural history. Anthropomorphic taxidermy and animal personification were in vogue in the mid-​nineteenth century, and were considered art forms: glass cases showing stuffed animals in human attitudes were displayed at the Crystal Palace (and admired by Queen Victoria). Marcus Stone, Dickens’s illustrator for Our Mutual Friend, had helped Dickens to find a model for Mr. Venus’s taxidermy shop in St. Giles. In his drawing for Chapter 7 you can just make out the silhouettes of two fighting frogs over Mr. Venus’s head.

Figure 3.1 “Mr Venus Surrounded by the Trophies of His Art,” by Marcus Stone. Illustration for Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Chapter 7.

Fighting frogs were common ornaments; you can find them at auction sites today. Indeed, a little bronze statue of dueling frogs occupied a spot on Dickens’s writing desk at Gad’s Hill Place, his home in Kent.9 Perhaps Dickens added the whimsical detail of the frogs in Mr. Venus’s shop window because he liked his own frogs. Or maybe the stuffed frogs are just a picturesque touch, a quaint object in an otherwise grotesque setting. “You’re casting your eye round the shop, Mr. Wegg. Let me show you a light,” offers Mr. Venus. “My working bench. My young man’s bench. A Wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations, warious. Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation. The mouldy ones a-​top. What’s in those hampers over them again, I don’t quite remember. Say, human warious. Cats. Articulated

Picturing  71 English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Dried cuticle, warious.” (88) What a bizarre and macabre inventory! As Mr. Venus certainly knows: “Oh, dear me!” he exclaims to Silas Wegg. “That’s the general panoramic view” (88). I think it is safe to assume the frogs in Our Mutual Friend are innocent of much deeper meaning. But I want to show you how a literary critic might read such a detail in a Victorian novel to investigate historical contexts that are not innocent, and that may have a disturbing trail of signification that carry implications for the ways we read Victorian realist fiction today. In The Ideas in Things (2006), Elaine Freedgood sees the mid-​Victorian novel as “a particularly rich site for tracing the fugitive meanings of apparently non-​symbolic objects” (4). These are the everyday things critics do not usually bother to interpret, the objects that “lie around” in the novel to signal to the reader a general sense of realness–​–​tables and chairs, curtains, carpets, umbrellas, ottomans. Objects such as these in a Victorian novel may be passed over as “largely meaningless,” says Freedgood, since “the protocols for reading the realist novel have long focused on subjects and plots” (1). We tend to read these things as just part of the novelist’s descriptive scene-​ setting. Freedgood, though, is concerned that to read this way is to suppress the multiple meanings that might attach to an object, rendering it “smooth, intelligible, consistent–​–​in short, rendering it what we have come to think of, in representation and in experience, as realistic” (90). Narrowing her focus on mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre, calico curtains in Mary Barton, and “Negro head” tobacco in Great Expectations, Freedgood first reads these things literally, as practical objects, and then metonymically, as stand-​ins for a complex history extending back and beyond the covers of the novel. Each of these particular objects, says Freedgood, “was highly consequential in the world in which the text was produced” (2). The knowledge that is hidden in these things has a bearing on the way we might read description in the Victorian novel and may tell us something about the associations that were made by Victorian readers. In Chapter 2 of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), we get an intimate description of the Barton family’s working-​class home in industrial Manchester. Fondle the details here: On the right of the door, as you entered, was a longish window, with a broad ledge. On each side of this, hung blue-​and-​white check curtains, which were now drawn, to shut in the friends met to enjoy themselves. Two geraniums, unpruned and leafy, which stood on the sill, formed a further defence from out-​door pryers. In the corner between the window and the fire-​side was a cupboard, apparently full of plates and dishes, cups and saucers, and some more nondescript articles, for which one

72  Picturing would have fancied their possessors could find no use—​such as triangular pieces of glass to save carving knives and forks from dirtying table-​ cloths. However, it was evident Mrs. Barton was proud of her crockery and glass, for she left her cupboard door open, with a glance round of satisfaction and pleasure. … The place seemed almost crammed with furniture (sure sign of good times among the mills). Beneath the window was a dresser with three deep drawers. Opposite the fire-​place was a table, which I should call a Pembroke, only that it was made of deal, and I cannot tell how far such a name may be applied to such humble material. On it, resting against the wall, was a bright green japanned tea-​tray, having a couple of scarlet lovers embracing in the middle. The fire-​light danced merrily on this, and really (setting all taste but that of a child’s aside) it gave a richness of colouring to that side of the room. It was in some measure propped up by a crimson tea-​caddy, also of japan ware. A round table on one branching leg really for use, stood in the corresponding corner to the cupboard; and, if you can picture all this with a washy, but clean stencilled pattern on the walls, you can form some idea of John Barton’s home. (15) Unlike the vast majority of her middle-​class readers, Gaskell herself had often visited the homes of factory workers in Manchester. The details in her description are documentary. But they would also signal to the Victorian reader that this laboring family lives in comfortable domesticity: they are proud of their household goods, things are clean and tidy (the tablecloth is protected from used silverware by a shard of glass), and they care for a bit of pleasant décor–​–the geraniums, the japanned tea-​tray, the stenciled walls. The room is homey, full of furniture, crockery, and firelight. Freedgood’s interest is in the window, and especially in the blue and white curtains. She notes that Mary Barton is a novel that is in one sense precisely about where curtains come from, so it is notable that our first encounter with them is as a consumer good and not as a commodity produced by workers like John Barton (a power loom weaver), who might well have participated in making the fabric at a local mill. (60) What is the meaning of these checked curtains in Mary Barton? One reading is simply that the Bartons are a properly domestic laboring-​class family who can afford (for now) an imitation Pembroke table and embellishments for their windows–​–​we’re to think of them as decent people. Freedgood, though, places the curtains in the context of their production and use in the nineteenth century. What sources of knowledge about calico were available in nineteenth-​century Britain? Freedgood notes,

Picturing  73 the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary output of histories and handbooks of the cotton trade, including rhymed children’s stories about the production of a bale of cotton, as well as books describing cotton to the working classes by the Societies for the Promotion of Useful and Christian Knowledge. What we see in these writings about textile production is what we do not see in many industrial novels, including Mary Barton: we see precisely where curtains come from and how. (69–​70) Readers of Mary Barton in the early 1850s, then, may have been familiar with any of a large number of works chronicling the progress of British textile industries. They might also have been to the Crystal Palace exhibition and watched “spinning jennies and power looms in action at various displays of industrial machinery” (Freedgood 23). These same hypothetical Victorians might have read about the history of Caribbean slavery in the newspapers or attended lectures on the subject. They might have known that checked cottons were associated with the African-​Caribbean slave trade (officially abolished in 1833), and that the slave trade was in turn associated with Indian calico (from Calicut, the village in Southern India famous for producing this textile). Jump to the 1860s, and perhaps those readers would have known about the “cotton famine” in Lancashire caused by the cessation of cotton imports from the United States during the Civil War, and the famines in India “caused in part by the East India Company’s importation of cheap Manchester textiles that put local weavers catastrophically out of business” (Freedgood 23). In her comprehensive analysis of this one object, Freedgood reflects on how the history of calico unravels Gaskell’s presentation of its domestic utility. Victorian consumers may have tacitly registered the imperial and industrial conditions–​–​the human cost–​–​behind their production. The meaning of blue-​ and-​white checked curtains, Freedgood concludes, is radically unstable in Mary Barton. Thus, she argues, modern readers of Victorian novels may do well to turn our attention to the repressed, often violent, history hidden in everyday things. To attempt to comprehend all the possible ways a description could trigger myriad associations in the minds of Victorian readers and to strip back all the cultural layers of meaning in a single object presented to our eyes would require considerable historical research and a deep dive into the archives. If an object in a novel piques your curiosity, go for it! But do not feel obligated to release a thousand subtexts with a little tug at the corner of the tapestry. If you are reading a Victorian novel for the first time, you may have to get the physical world firmly in your mind before you begin to interrogate it. Film adaptations of Victorian novels have helped us get an idea of what people and things looked like back then. Let the novel’s descriptive data stream into your private imagination. If the novelist has a gift for description, your human

74  Picturing senses and your own lived experience will help you to see what the author is seeing. Spotlight Thomas Hardy was born in a small village in Dorset, in the southwest of England, a region he used as the setting for his Wessex novels. Hardy was trained as an architect, and his novels display an eye for small details. His descriptions can be so finely grained they might be taken as the perspective of a god or of an insect–​–​except that he knew very well that what we think we see is usually influenced by how we feel. “In making even horizontal and clear inspections,” he wrote in Far from the Madding Crowd, “we colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in” (17). There is no such thing as absolute objectivity. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) was Hardy’s first successful novel. It is a rural story that has it all, including a fiery independent heroine in Bathsheba Everdene and a reckless seducer in Sergeant Troy–​–​and one unforgettable description of a sheep shearing! This is the one to start with if you are going to tackle Hardy, but all his novels have great visual power. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy’s presentation of the heroine against various rural backdrops perfectly amplifies her passion and her resilience, as well as her tragic isolation. The scenes at Talbothay’s dairy in the second phase of Tess’s story are so sensually expressive they seem almost to glow. They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows in detached remnants of small extent. On the gray moisture of the grass were marks where the cows had lain through the night—​dark-​green islands of dry herbage the size of their carcases, in the general sea of dew. From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow had rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of which trail they found her; the snoring breath from her nostrils, when she recognized them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one. (131) I have never been on a dairy farm in my life. But I can see and smell those cows, the moisture, the woolly fog. I have been to this place, as in a dream. Notes 1 The Romantic poets challenged these ideas and emphasized the wonder within the small or hidden aspects of nature. For the Romantics, the perceiver was as important as the thing perceived. See Wall, pp. 38–​9. 2 Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson had a friendly quarrel about realism in the 1880s. Stevenson thought excessive specificity a quagmire for all serious writers, drowning “our little passionate story … in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence or

Picturing  75 slipshod talk.” See “A Note on Realism in Art,” Essays of Travel, p. 284. Stevenson wrote to James (15 August 1893) about the problem of getting over “the besotting particularity of fiction. ‘Roland approached the house; it had green doors and window blinds; and there was a scraper on the upper step.’ To hell with Roland and the scraper!” The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol. 8, p. 152. 3 Victorian readers would have understood the reference to Add-​ El-​ Kadir-​ El-​ Maghrabee, who lived in Cairo earlier in the century. He foretold events through a small pool of ink in the palm of his hand. 4 Susan R. Horton presents many examples in “Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves.” 5 The Derby Day is at The Tate Britain. Their website notes that Frith “commissioned the photographer Robert Howlett to ‘photograph for him from the roof of a cab as many queer groups of figures as he could’ ” (Journal of the Photographic Society, 15 January 1863). He asked a real jockey called Bundy to pose on a hobbyhorse in his studio for the riders on the right of the picture, and also hired an acrobat and his son, whom he saw performing in a pantomime in Drury Lane. www.tate.org.uk/​ art/​artwo​rks/​frith-​the-​derby-​day-​n00​615 6 These are the first sentences in Belinda by Maria Edgeworth (1801); Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen (1814); and Waverley by Sir Walter Scott (1814). 7 Two superb works about the process by which we form visual images when we read fiction are Peter Mendelsund’s What We See When We Read and Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book. 8 “They found the usual dim light burning in the window of Mr. Venus’s establishment, imperfectly disclosing to the public the usual pair of preserved frogs, sword in hand, with their point of honour still unsettled” (487); “The very next evening saw Mr. Boffin peeping in at the preserved frogs in Mr. Venus’s shop-​window” (563); “Meanwhile, Mr. Venus, who had left the duelling frogs to fight it out in his absence by candlelight for the public delectation, put the shutters up” (643). 9 See Dean, “The Fighting Frogs,” and Bown, “There’s Animation! Dickens and Taxidermy.”

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 141–​8. Bown, Nicola. “There’s Animation! Dickens and Taxidermy.” Accessed at Our Mutual Friend Reading Project, 29 May 2014. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Penguin, 2006. Bronte, Charlotte. Villette. 1853. Penguin, 2004. Cohen, William. “Arborealities: The Tactile Ecology of Hardy’s Woodlanders.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2014). Accessed at https://​19.bbk.ac.uk/​arti​cle/​id/​1644/​ Dean, F. R. “The Fighting Frogs.” Dickensian, vol. 45 (Jan. 1, 1949), p. 22. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1861. Penguin, 1996. —​—​—​. Little Dorrit. 1857. Penguin, 1998. —​—​—​. Our Mutual Friend. 1865. Penguin, 1997. —​—​—​. The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley, Oxford University Press, 2012.

76  Picturing Disraeli, Benjamin. Sybil, or The Two Nations. 1845. Penguin, 1985. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. Penguin, 1985. Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. 1848. Penguin, 1996. Gissing, George. The Nether World. 1889. Dent, 1983. Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Pantheon Books, 1961. Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd. 1874. W. W. Norton, 1986. —​—​—​. Jude the Obscure. 1895. Penguin, 1998. —​—​—​. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 1891. Penguin, 2003. —​—​—​. The Mayor of Casterbridge. 1886. W. W. Norton, 1977. —​—​—​. The Return of the Native. 1878. Penguin, 1999. Hardy, Florence Emily. The Life of Thomas Hardy. Macmillan, 1930. Horton, Susan R. “Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves.” Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, edited by Carole T. Christ and John O. Jordan, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 1–​26. Irwin, Michael. Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-​century Novel. Allen and Unwin, 1979. James, Henry. A Small Boy and Others. 1913. Gibson Square Books, 2001. —​—​—​. “The Art of Fiction.” 1884. The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Roger Gard, Penguin, 1987, pp. 186–​206. —​—​—​. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962. Lewes, G. H. “Dickens in Relation to Criticism.” Fortnightly Review, vol. 11, no. 62 (Feb. 1879), pp. 141–​54. Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-​ Century England. Princeton University Press, 1984. Mendelsund, Peter. What We See When We Read. Vintage Books, 2014. Miller, J. Hillis. On Literature. Routledge, 2002. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Orwell, George. “Charles Dickens.” A Collection of Essays, Harcourt Brace, 1981, pp. 48–​103. Rosenblatt, Louise. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. Ruskin, John. Modern Painters Vol. 1. The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. II, National Library Association, n.d. Accessed at Project Gutenberg. Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Princeton University Press, 1999. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Essays of Travel and in the Art of Writing. Scribner’s, 1911. Talbot, William Henry Fox. “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing.” 1839. The Photography Criticism CyberArchive. Accessed at www.nea​rbyc​afe.com. —​—​—​. The Pencil of Nature. Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844. Accessed at Project Gutenberg. Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. 1883. Penguin, 1993. —​—​—​. The Small House at Allington. 1864. Oxford University Press, 1989. Wall, Cynthia. The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century. University of Chicago Press, 2014.

4 People

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, fictional characters changed. Instead of modeling characters after melodramatic types or actors in a moral allegory–​–​the Rake, the Heroine, the Country Gentleman–​–​novelists began to emphasize characters’ contemporaneity and their uniqueness. In earlier novels, for example, characters were given names that blatantly signaled their role in the story, such as “Mr. Badman” and “Miss Coquette.” When Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding bestowed characters in their novels with an ordinary given name and a plausible surname–​–​Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Clarissa Harlowe, Richard Lovelace–​–​it was almost revolutionary. These names suggest something about the character’s moral disposition, to be sure, but they also sound credible, like the names of people you would read about in the newspapers. Their names do not point obviously to a set of abstract values, but to a particular identity, to someone you might like to learn more about. One contemporary reviewer noted with approval that Fielding’s characters are named “not with fantastic high-​ sounding Names, but such as, tho’ they sometimes had some reference to the Character, had a more modern termination” (Watt 19–​20). These literary characters were not “types,” but individuals, unique people with their own set of conflicting emotions, reflexes, mannerisms, and psychologies. They could be you or me. The reader’s relationship to a novel’s characters is vital in fiction that seeks both to delight and instruct. In the 1770s and 1780s, the sentimental novel (also called the novel of sensibility) sought to cultivate tender emotions. Readers were meant to feel with the characters and to empathize with their plight. Some nineteenth-​century novelists worked loosely within this tradition: the moral effect of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) or of George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) is produced by the reader’s compassionate and tearful sympathy for its main characters. In the eighteenth-​ century novel of moral instruction, readers are given exemplum of good and bad characters, or satirical samples of human nature. In Victorian novels such as Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875) or William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), an omniscient narrator also guides the reader’s moral DOI: 10.4324/9781003388401-5

78  People assessment of characters’ foibles. As we know, Victorian novels have designs on both the reader’s feelings and her judgment. These novelists are seriously invested in your response to their fictional people because the moral burden of the work is carried by its characters–​–​even by so-​called flat or grotesque characters, by Eppie or Sir Pitt Crawley or Little Nell. Virginia Woolf wrote that the great nineteenth-​century novelists “brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character” (“Mr. Bennett”). We care about Jane Eyre or Pip or Jude Fawley because we respond to something recognizable in them–​–​we understand Jane’s sense of injustice, we feel Pip’s guilt, and know with Jude what social exclusion means. And as we will see later in this chapter, our empathic involvement with fictional characters’ experiences and emotions in the Victorian novel may help us rearrange our own moral and psychological equipment. In the tradition of eighteenth-​century fiction, Victorian readers expected characters to be believable, and nineteenth-​ century novelists strove to create recognizable, realistic modern people. They also bore the burden of creating interesting people readers would remember and continue to care about over the months or weeks of serial publication. But how does a writer make a character real and compelling? Let us count the ways. Dickens, for example, liked to attach signature gestures and reflexive habits to his characters so that whenever they reappear in the serial the reader knows immediately what to expect. When David Copperfield first meets Mr. Micawber he sees a stoutish, middle-​aged person, in a brown surtout and black tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head (which was a large one, and very shining) than there is upon an egg, and with a very extensive face. (138) Mr. Micawber’s clothes are shabby, but he sports “an imposing shirt-​collar,” carries “a jaunty sort of a stick, with a large pair of rusty tassels to it” and wears “a quizzing-​ glass” (a little magnifying lens) outside his coat. Mr. Micawber always has “a certain condescending roll in his voice, and a certain indescribable air of doing something genteel” (138), his speech is consistently and exuberantly periphrastic, and he loves to be surrounded by his growing family while he makes his special bowl of strong punch. Does he have a complex inner landscape? Not really. Mr. Micawber is the black tights, bald head, big collars, strong punch, and longwinded speeches. He is forever and unforgettably himself whenever he shows up in the novel. When David runs into him unexpectedly at Canterbury, his delighted recognition echoes the reader’s: “It was Mr. Micawber! Mr. Micawber with his eye-​glass, and his walking-​stick, and his shirt-​collar, and his genteel air, and the condescending roll in his voice, all complete!” (222). Many characters by Dickens have been turned into merchandise, but none perhaps so often, or so affectionately, as Mr. Micawber.

People  79 Some critics have felt that Dickens created mostly caricatures in his novels, people without much depth or complexity. G. H. Lewes wrote in 1872 that Dickens’s characters have “nothing fluctuating … about them,” Sir David Cecil in 1935 that he “lost sight of the inner man altogether,” George Orwell in 1940 that Dickens’s characters “have no mental life.”1 These writers are responding to certain critical standards that took hold at the end of the nineteenth century–​ –​ we might call them Jamesian standards–​ –​ and by which characters in realist novels still tend to be judged. Before we examine the presentation of fictional people in Victorian novels, then, we should briefly look at the aesthetic conventions that ruled novel criticism from about the 1870s and through most of the twentieth century. First, it was understood that a character should be psychologically and emotionally complex because, as psychoanalysis has taught us, the human personality is not a single knowable unit but an arena of competing forces, instincts, and desires. Any decent nineteenth-​ century novelist should be able to toss off a physical description–​–​that is part of her or his vocation as a writer. The true test of the novelist is to get inside a character’s feelings and thoughts. Second, in a realist novel, characters should grow and develop, and their personalities should evolve with the passage of time. The reader has nothing at stake in watching the antics of static characters; they’re simply props. Characters must change and as we’ve seen, knowledge of a character’s origins and personal history was considered crucial to understanding his personality. Third, properly realistic characters should not behave as if they’ve just stepped down from the stage of a music hall melodrama. Their actions and intentions should be what we think of as believable; characters should act according to the strictures of modern life. Extravagant conduct, overwrought emotions, or stylized and histrionic gestures spoil verisimilitude and make characters look like fantastic cartoons. Finally, as we learned in the chapter on plots, characters in realistic novels are expected to advance the story or underscore the theme. No superfluous persons should be introduced. Characters are subservient to the plot, and the plot, as Aristotle said (before the novel was invented) is the linchpin of–​–​what else?–​–​“organic unity.” Charles Dickens must not have known about these criteria for creating realistic characters, for by these standards a whole swathe of his fictional people might be dismissed as psychologically colorless, unchanging, grotesquely over-​the-​top, and completely redundant to the story. And yet Dickens’s characters feel utterly human; they have a way of surviving in the reader’s mind. Other novelists have marveled at Dickens’s ability to make even the weirdest character feel real. Anthony Trollope, whose treatment of character was more probing and far less theatrical than was Dickens’s, was baffled by his rival’s success: I do acknowledge that Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Pecksniff, and others have become household words in every house, as though they were human

80  People beings; but to my judgment they are not human beings, nor are any of the characters human which Dickens has portrayed. It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man’s power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature. (Autobiography 226) In her 1925 essay on David Copperfield, Virginia Woolf marveled at Dickens’s extraordinary ability to create “characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild and yet extraordinarily revealing remarks.” If Dickens’s characters lack “emotion and psychology” or “subtlety and complexity” according to modernist conventions, Woolf says, maybe we are looking in the wrong places for our so-​called realism (78–​9). Writers after around 1910 wanted to polish up the novel for a new era, but many of them could not brush from their sleeves the lint and stain of realism as practiced by their Victorian predecessors.2 In 1927, E. M. Forster introduced to the literary world the now familiar terms “flat” and “round” to delineate the degree of a character’s psychological thickness. “Dickens’ people are nearly all flat,” Forster asserted, and a host of subsequent critics have agreed. And yet even Forster admitted that in Dickens’s characters there is still “this wonderful feeling of human depth.” “Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognize the instant they re-​enter, and yet achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow.” Dickens’s “immense success with types,” Forster concludes, “suggests that there may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit” (71–​2). The modernist fear of flatness was a reaction to the Victorian novelist’s preoccupation with the superficialities of the fictional person: what’s on the outside of a character. As we saw in the previous chapter, Victorian novelists are keen on physical description, and so the treatment of people usually begins with what is externally visible about them. Realistic characters are to be a solid presence in a solid world–​–​they must sit on furniture and take trains, attend church services and drink considerable amounts of tea. I cannot think of many Victorian novels that begin with a character’s interiority (one exception is the remarkable opening of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where the reader is inside the choirmaster John Jasper’s opium dream). Why are fictional characters in Victorian novels presented first as a surface and only later as a depth? Once again, the answer is tied to the looming importance of society. The Victorian novelist creates characters who are social beings first and foremost, and in society people are initially sized up based on their accoutrements–​–​their faces, clothes, and conveyances are all clues to social class, temperament, motivation, or moral disposition. Here is an excerpt from the very first paragraph of Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1866), that introduces the reader to the heroine, fifteen-​ year-​old Lucilla Marjoribanks. What do you notice?

People  81 When her schoolfellows talked of her to their friends—​for Lucilla was already an important personage at Mount Pleasant—​the most common description they gave her was, that she was “a large girl”; and there was great truth in the adjective. She was not to be described as a tall girl—​which conveys an altogether different idea—​but she was large in all particulars, full and well-​developed, with somewhat large features, not at all pretty as yet, though it was known in Mount Pleasant that somebody had said that such a face might ripen into beauty, and become “grandiose,” for anything anybody could tell. Miss Marjoribanks was not vain; but the word had taken possession of her imagination, as was natural, and solaced her much when she made the painful discovery that her gloves were half a number larger, and her shoes a hair-​breadth broader, than those of any of her companions; but the hands and feet were both perfectly well shaped; and being at the same time well clothed and plump, were much more presentable and pleasant to look upon than the lean rudimentary schoolgirl hands with which they were surrounded. To add to these excellences, Lucilla had a mass of hair which, if it could but have been cleared a little in its tint, would have been golden, though at present it was nothing more than tawny, and curly to exasperation. She wore it in large thick curls, which did not, however, float or wave, or do any of the graceful things which curls ought to do; for it had this aggravating quality, that it would not grow long, but would grow ridiculously, unmanageably thick, to the admiration of her companions, but to her own despair, for there was no knowing what to do with those short but ponderous locks. (4–​5) Let’s decode this person. The half-​a-​number up glove size and the broad feet tell the reader something about Lucilla’s potential to be somewhat alarmingly–​–​grandiosely–​–​unconventional. What about her “ponderous locks”? A footnote by the editor of my edition, Elisabeth Jay, offers inside information: Lucilla’s hair cannot be contained within any of the fashionable mid-​century styles: ringlets, braids, or a low chignon. Nor does its colour, “tawny”, quite attain the golden hues associated with the purity and the financial and sexual attractions of the conventional Victorian heroine. (498) Note, too, that the words “large” or “larger” appear five times in this description. Lucilla, we learn later, is a young woman with “large and public-​ spirited views” (153) and a “large mind” (203), who throws herself into “large and philanthropic projects” (106). Even her pretty writing paper is engraved “with Lucilla on it in delicate rose-​tinted letters, the L very large, and the concluding letters very small” (185–​6). Lucilla Marjoribanks takes up

82  People space and thinks big–​–​and as the reader of Miss Marjoribanks will see with delight, she can be a little bossy. Oliphant’s characterization of Lucilla may seem conspicuous to our modern eyes. Yet much can depend on our interpretations of people’s appearance, and we unconsciously read people’s faces and mannerisms all the time, seeking clues to their motives, gauging their trustworthiness or treachery, their honesty or hypocrisy. In an essay about characters entitled “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), Woolf claimed, “people have to acquire a good deal of skill in character-​reading if they are to live a single year of life without disaster.” This is certainly true. Research in the emerging fields of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science have shown that humans acquired specific mental capacities to interpret faces and gestures because our brains need a mechanism to gauge another person’s capacity for cooperation or for conflict. In a book called Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?, the scholar Blakey Vermeule proposes that reading about fictional people exercises this intelligence. She sees reading novels as a form of productive “gossip” that may help people get a handle on the social complexity of living in groups. “We humans spend a great deal, perhaps most, of our energy seeking to explain ourselves and other people,” she writes. We automatically engage in “mind reading” or “mentalizing” to help us “meet the rigorous demands of social interaction.” This is an evolved capacity, essential for human survival. We humans, along with other primates, are always guessing at the mental states of others, attributing to them beliefs, intentions, desires, and attitudes, with varying degrees of competence (34). “Knowing what other people are thinking and being able to predict what they are going to do are two of the most important cognitive skills we humans possess,” says Vermeule. “In fact, we stake our lives every day on such predictions” (34). Though they did not know as much about neuroscience as we do, the Victorians understood very well the risks and liabilities of character interpretation. In the nineteenth century, people had to be legible. As the industrial revolution brought thousands of people into London and the large manufacturing cities in the north, tightly knit rural communities gave way to the comparative anonymity of urban life. It became more difficult to know your neighbors, and as the century progressed, there was greater social mobility and also democratic pressure to remove or elide traditional markings of class status. The nineteenth century was also an empirical age, braced by a scientific and philosophical faith that sensory experience and observation would lead to knowledge. It was assumed that human behavior, social structures, all matter of phenomena could be understood by applying defined principals–​–​although it was also feared that the conditions of physical life could be unstable, the operations of Nature obscure. How are modern people to sort through the labyrinth of human motives, appearances, desires, and transgressions in a period of such tremendous flux? How does one read a person’s true character?

People  83 The street you live on, the wine you drink, whether you drive a dogcart or a carriage showed the world how much money you had. But as capitalism revved up it was thought that more than one’s social status could be signaled by appearance. In Sartor Resartus, published in 1831, Thomas Carlyle’s Professor Teufelsdrockh expounds a “Philosophy of Clothes” in which he warns his contemporaries to heed outward appearances as emblems of the soul. “All visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth” (174). Scientists and laymen took seriously the pseudoscience of physiognomy, the theory that a person’s facial features and expressions could be an index to moral character. The eminent utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill tried to find a deductive “Science of Character” called Ethnology, and even proposed a “Political Ethnology,” a science of national character. It was thought that someone’s personality could be deduced by the form of the hand (chiromancy) or the slope of a person’s handwriting (graphology). Scientists believed they could determine a person’s intelligence by the shape of his or her skull (phrenology). An entire field was devoted to the study of criminals and the mentally insane based on facial features that supposedly indicated deviance or “degeneration.” The Victorian age was obsessed with taxonomies. Scientists, census-​ takers, politicians, and journalists classified people by profession, marital status, place of birth, “ethnicity” (Scottish, Irish, Welsh), and later in the century, by race–​–​which in the nineteenth century could mean a nationality with a common culture and language, or a category of humans who shared a particular trait. “Race” was an evolving concept throughout this period, though as Edward Beasley has argued, “the idea of separate physical races” was widespread by the 1860s. Reports by missionaries and civil servants in the British colonies, the new visual culture of the popular press, and propaganda regarding the “purity” of Anglo-​Saxon blood and “a single special English nation” all led to the formation of ideas about racial difference (Beasley 18). “We have no need to go abroad to study ethnology. A walk through the streets of London will show us specimens of every human variety known,” wrote Eliza Lynn in an essay called “Passing Faces,” published in Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words, in 1855. Lynn goes on to classify people first according to their race, then to their likeness to camels, spaniels, rats, sheep, and giraffes (it’s hard to tell how serious she is in this) then to “their social condition and their histories, stamped on them as legibly as arms are painted on a carriage-​panel” (263). Human faces superseded even outward signs of social class as an index to character–​–​if one knew how to read them. A few years earlier, in an 1851 essay called “Physiognomy,” Elizabeth Eastlake noted “the tremendous responsibility given to the human countenance, in the social economy of the world, as the great medium of recognition between man and man” (Hartley 105). Even Charles Darwin declared that interpreting human features was essential “for

84  People the welfare of mankind” (Darwin 360). In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, he made an extraordinary case for the universality of human facial expressions, what he called a “language of the emotions” (360). It was one of the first scientific works to include photographs. Darwin showed, through extensive examples and case studies, that outward expressions are an index to human feelings: the downward curve of the mouth or a movement of the eyebrows, whether made voluntarily or involuntarily, communicates specific emotions and states of mind. Anticipating the discovery of mirror neurons by more than a hundred years, Darwin wrote that there is an “intimate relation which exists between almost all the emotions and outward manifestations,” arguing that “even the simulation of an emotion tends to arouse it in our minds” (360). But note the word simulation.

Figure 4.1 “Obliquity of the eyebrows.” The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, by Charles Darwin, 1872.

Evolutionary theory, as we know, sought to describe the place of humans in nature and in history, and to provide an explanation for human behavior. But Nature can wear clever disguises, even within that “special English nation” of Anglo-​Saxons. Here, for example, is George Eliot’s description of Maggie and Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss:

People  85 He was one of those lads that grow everywhere in England, and at twelve or thirteen years of age look as much alike as goslings, —​a lad with light-​brown hair, cheeks of cream and roses, full lips, indeterminate nose and eyebrows,—​a physiognomy in which it seems impossible to discern anything but the generic character to boyhood; as different as possible from poor Maggie’s phiz [physiognomy], which Nature seemed to have moulded and coloured with the most decided intention. But that same Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies. (29) Under the sign of a generic type of English boy, light-​ haired and rosy-​ cheeked, Nature “conceals some of her most rigid, inflexible purposes, some of her most unmodifiable characters,” while Maggie, “a dark-​eyed, demonstrative, rebellious girl” may turn out to be “a passive being compared with this pink-​and-​white bit of masculinity with the indeterminate features” (29). Eliot introduces her protagonists conventionally, with a descriptive portrayal that relies on stereotypes and the reader’s assumptions about how people look. But her point is to subvert those assumptions and instead indicate Nature’s “deep cunning.” The narrator cautions against the human propensity to judge a person’s disposition from a preconceived catalog of “types.” Literary periodization tends to draw a firm line between the way Victorians imagined the self–​–​unified, coherent, ensouled, an incorporation of body, mind, and will–​–​and the modernist view of the self as a fragmented or free-​floating ego. Yet understanding the self was as great a problem for Victorian novelists as it was to twentieth-​century writers under the sway of psychoanalytic theory. The Victorians were obsessively interested in human subjectivity, and indeed the studiousness, and even suspicion, with which they regarded a person’s physical features hints at some uneasiness about what may be hidden beneath the surface. Sensation novels and stories of mystery and detection of course relied heavily on tropes about double lives and misleading appearances. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), for instance, Lucy Audley’s “magic power of fascination,” her “wealth of showering flaxen curls,” “melting blue eyes,” “slender throat,” and musical, low voice effectively deceive everyone (11–​ 2). Her angelic beauty conceals a deceptive and dangerous pathology–​–​let’s just say that Lucy has a lot of secrets. But not only sensation novels play with disguises. Indeed, nineteenth-​century novelists deploy doubles and doppelgangers with unusual frequency: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, A Tale of Two Cities, The Woman in White, Great Expectations, Uncle Silas, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Deronda, The Master of Ballantrae, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Jude the Obscure all play with the idea of

86  People counterparts or shadow selves. The elusiveness and mutability of the self and self-​alienation crop up almost everywhere in Victorian novels: The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—​I hardly know, Sir, just at present—​at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” “What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar, sternly. “Explain yourself!” “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see” (Carroll 35) In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle’s Teufelsdrockh exclaims in desperation, “Who am I; what is this ME?” (160). Although it would be another sixty years before Sigmund Freud took the first steps toward devising a new science and an arduous methodology to discover where the self might be found, Victorian novelists had long been interested in exploring irrational states and mental processes, in dreams, trances, memories, and the borderline between sanity and madness. “Madhouses are large and only too numerous,” thinks Robert Audley in Braddon’s novel, “yet surely it is strange they are not larger, when we think of how many helpless wretches must beat their brains against this hopeless persistency of the orderly outward world, as compared with the storm and tempest, the riot and confusion within—​when we remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-​day and sane to-​morrow, mad yesterday and sane to-​ day” (176). The patient registration of human behavior is a defining feature of the Victorian novel, due in part to the influence of evolutionary science. Victorian Evangelicalism, too, encouraged an intense preoccupation with the inner person, a constant checking-​in on the state of one’s conscience. Evangelicalism “sharpened and justified a picture of the self’s truth as unendingly elusive,” writes Andrew H. Miller (21). New psychological technologies were required to understand this more intricate and layered self and the realist novel was one such technology, especially in its concern with moral psychology–​–​the intentions and motives, will and beliefs, that form people’s characters. Victorian sages were profoundly concerned with questions of spiritual growth and improvement and in the origins of feelings such as guilt, remorse, and shame. A character at war with his conscience is an abiding theme in Victorian fiction (hypocrisy was the Victorians’ favorite vice) and almost all the great Victorian novels are about someone who is torn between

People  87 duty to society and duty to self, by the requirements and rewards of belonging to the group and the pull of autonomy promised by democratic liberalism. As Woolf shrewdly observed, it is difficult to interpret the world and its people, and the stakes of reading it rightly can be very high indeed, especially for people with fewer social advantages. Women in the nineteenth-​century had limited power over the trajectory of their lives. In the 1860s, when Eliot and Braddon wrote their very different novels about entrapped heroines, women could not vote, attend a university, own property, or study medicine, politics, law, or business (despite Florence Nightingale’s heroism, nursing was not considered a respectable profession for women until the late 1880s). Unless a middle-​class woman was willing to live as a dependent in her father’s home for the rest of her life, she would have to get married. Marriage meant a degree of financial security and more autonomy–​–​a married woman has her own household to run and a firmer place in the social order–​–​but marriage also placed a woman legally under the control of her husband. Choosing a spouse was the crucial, life-​determining decision of a woman’s life, often a matter of social and economic survival. Many Victorian novels, by both women and men, are heroine-​centered or have strong female characters–​–​which is odd, given women’s real-​life status in the nineteenth century as second-​class citizens. Perhaps novels about a woman’s hemmed-​in existence, about her desire for liberty and self-​direction, tapped into the collective unconscious of a nation struggling to adapt to an increasingly democratic future? It has been suggested that the marriage plot in fiction serves an ideology that normalizes and controls sexual and familial relationships under patriarchy: in portraying marriage as a woman’s destiny, romantic narratives of courtship and marriage naturalize a social institution that is in fact built on political and economic power structures. This theory seems fair enough if we are talking about a novel by Jane Austen. In the Victorian novel, though, the marriage plot may be subverted in order to challenge or undermine conventional expectations for women. Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw, Dorothea Brooke, Becky Sharp, Maggie Tulliver, Gwendolen Harleth, Bathsheba Everdene, Margaret Hale, Sue Bridehead–​–​ these heroines are involved in a blatant drama of choice, rebellion, bargaining, and compromise, a three-​way struggle between submission to social norms, self-​empowerment, and personal happiness. If the Victorians learned how to read human character by reading about characters in novels, women readers especially gained information from presentations of masculinity, and from a heroine’s judgments and misjudgments about men and their motives. Indeed, marriage and sexual transgression were scrutinized assiduously in all matter of writing throughout the Victorian period, and especially in novels. Taken as a whole, relations between the sexes in a Victorian novel are often scenes of serious character surveillance. Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), first published under the androgynous-​ sounding pseudonym “Acton Bell,” is one of the most

88  People remarkable feminist novels of the period, a courageous dissection of Victorian marriage laws, domestic violence, addiction, and the question of women’s vocation in the modern world. At the beginning of the novel, Helen Graham is eighteen and on the marriage market. Her aunt, worried about Helen’s ignorance of the world, offers her a warning: “Helen! Don’t boast, but watch. Keep a guard over your eyes and ears as the inlets of your heart, and over your lips as the outlet, lest they betray you in a moment of unwariness. Receive, coldly and dispassionately, every attention, till you have ascertained and duly considered the worth of the aspirant; and let your affections be consequent upon approbation alone. First study; then approve; then love. Let your eyes be blind to all external attractions, your ears deaf to all the fascinations of flattery and light discourse.—​These are nothing—​and worse than nothing—​snares and wiles of the tempter, to lure the thoughtless to their own destruction.” (132) Helen thinks her aunt is overly protective and laughs off her advice. One night soon after this conversation, a very handsome gentleman at a ball rescues Helen from the droning voice of an old bore by whisking her away to dance. In the carriage on their way home, her aunt asks about him. “I have heard your uncle speak of young Mr. Huntingdon. I’ve heard him say, ‘He’s a fine lad, that young Huntingdon, but a bit wildish, I fancy.’ So I’d have you beware” (135). “I cannot believe there is any harm in those laughing blue eyes,” Helen answers. “False reasoning, Helen!” said she, with a sigh. “Well, we ought to be charitable, you know, aunt—​besides, I don’t think it is false: I am an excellent physiognomist, and I always judge of people’s characters by their looks—​not by whether they are handsome or ugly, but by the general cast of the countenance. For instance, I should know by your countenance that you were not of a cheerful, sanguine disposition; and I should know by Mr. Wilmot’s, that he was a worthless old reprobate; and by Mr. Boarham’s, that he was not an agreeable companion; and by Mr. Huntingdon’s, that he was neither a fool nor a knave, though, possibly, neither a sage nor a saint—​but that is no matter to me, as I am not likely to meet him again—​unless as an occasional partner in the ball-​room.” (136) But oh, dear reader, she does meet Mr. Huntingdon again. Like the heroine of Jane Eyre, who is also “an excellent physiognomist” and often discreetly examines the countenance of her employer, Edward Rochester (finding signs of both rigidity and softness), Helen learns that you cannot judge a man by his manners, or his blue eyes. Helen escapes from her disastrous marriage, and

People  89 she and her young son move to a small village where she passes as a widow named Mrs. Graham who makes a modest income from her paintings. Helen is wary of strangers, especially men, and is herself an object of intense speculation in the village. In fact, everyone in this novel seems a bit shifty–​–​at one point, Helen’s would-​be suitor, Gilbert Markham, horsewhips her brother to an inch of his life because he thinks he is Helen’s lover! Marriage for Helen is a spiritual life-​or-​death matter. Brontë presents her readers with massive evidence that a woman’s very survival could depend on how she reads the minds and motives of strangers. Jump ahead forty-​five years to George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) and we see a different kind of character surveillance, though the options and perils are, alas, still much the same for women when it comes to marriage. Twenty-​one-​year-​old Monica Madden is an attractive and educated young woman. Because of family misfortunes, she has had to find work as a clerk in a draper’s shop in London–​–​for her, a step down the social ladder. One Sunday afternoon as she is strolling around Richmond, she has “an adventure.” An “an oldish man, with grizzled whiskers and rather a stern visage” sits beside her on a park bench. How old might he be? After all, he was probably not fifty—​perchance not much more than forty. His utterance fell short of perfect refinement, but seemed that of an educated man. And certainly his clothes were such as a gentleman wears. He had thin, hairy hands, unmarked by any effect of labour; the nails could not have been better cared for. Was it a bad sign that he carried neither gloves nor walking-​stick? (35) Gissing chooses to introduce the character of Edmund Widdowson through Monica’s wary eyes and weary thoughts: just before this stranger shows up, she is contemplating her unmarried sisters’ poverty and their loneliness, the drudgery of her life at the shop, and the slim chance she might get lucky and find “a man whom she could respect—​not to say love” (34). Then this chap sits next to her on the bench. Is he respectable, or is he trying to pick her up? Monica is not being paranoid. An unchaperoned woman would need to construe the character of a man to whom she was not properly introduced, and by the 1890s society was opening up enough that genteel women and men could strike up an acquaintance in public spaces. After some polite conversation, Monica agrees to meet this gentleman on the following Sunday, where she has an opportunity to examine him more carefully: But for cheek-​bones that were too prominent and nostrils rather too large, he was not ill-​featured. No particular force of character declared itself in his countenance, and his mode of speech did not suggest a very active brain. Speculating again about his age, Monica concluded that he must be two or three and forty, in spite of the fact that his grizzled beard argued

90  People for a higher figure. He had brown hair untouched by any sign of advanced life, his teeth were white and regular, and something—​she could not make clear to her mind exactly what—​convinced her that he had a right to judge himself comparatively young. (43) She is also reassured of his respectability because this time he does carry gloves and a walking-​stick. They decide to take a boat out on the river: Widdowson managed the sculls without awkwardness, but by no means like a man well trained in this form of exercise. On sitting down, he had taken off his hat, stowed it away, and put on a little travelling-​cap, which he drew from his pocket. Monica thought this became him. After all, he was not a companion to be ashamed of. She looked with pleasure at his white hairy hands with their firm grip; then at his boots—​very good boots indeed. He had gold links in his white shirt-​cuffs, and a gold watch-​guard chosen with a gentleman’s taste. (44) The reader pieces together Mr. Widdowson through Monica’s inspection, while also getting information about what Monica cares about–​–​his age and his income (those “very good boots indeed”). Monica is not emotionally interested in Widdowson, but she is terrified of poverty, still often the fate of an unmarried woman even in the 1890s. She permits Mr. Widdowson’s attentions, one thing leads to another, and finally she agrees to marry him. It is not long before she learns that her seemingly mild and genteel husband has unsuspected depths–​–​of the Othello variety. Suffice it so say the marriage does not bring her happiness, despite those outward signs of Widdowson’s refinement. The title of The Odd Women refers to the unmarried or “surplus” women in the late Victorian period. Though more professions were available to women in the last decades of the century, marriage was often still the only way a middle-​class women could survive economically. Gissing’s novel is a candid, sometimes tragic, treatment of women’s struggle for social and economic equality, as well as of the psychological and emotional costs of wasted talent for so many women. In this novel about progressive-​thinking “New Women” and the men who struggle to understand and, at times, control them, characters study each other’s faces, bodies, clothes, and speech with cautious circumspection. “Every woman wears a mask,” says the hero, Everard Barfoot, in that offhand, sexist way he has (222). But then, as The Odd Women unnervingly demonstrates, so does every man. Victorian novelists encumbered their characters with physiognomies (eyebrows, nostrils) and accessories (gloves, boots) to anchor them empirically to the real world, and to help readers imagine them as embodied beings.

People  91 But can a human be known, really seen and understood, through any form of representation? The most minute and detailed description, wrote Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers, would hardly give more satisfaction to the reader than the skill of the photographer does to the anxious mother desirous to possess an absolute duplicate of her beloved child. The likeness is indeed true, but it is a dull, dead, unfeeling, inauspicious likeness. (186) Something escapes the writer’s pen, the photographer’s lens. “Let photographers and daguerreotypers do what they will, and improve as they may with further skill on that which skill has already done, they will never achieve a portrait of the human face divine,” says Trollope’s narrator (186). “Attempts at description are stupid; who can all at once describe a human being?” says the narrator of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda “Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances. We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language” (111). Victorian novelists knew that there was much more to creating real, believable fictional people than just describing their faces or clothing. There is something ineffable in a human being that cannot be labeled and particularized, and this something is of enduring moral interest. Victorian novels want to understand how people acquire their beliefs and moral feelings, what guides or models they resort to when they are pressed to make crucial choices, and how they train to be in moral readiness when crises arise. Literary critics used to worry (perhaps some still do) that it was intellectually naive to talk about fictional characters as though they were real people, or to identify with them in any way.3 Formalist or structuralist critics, for example, argued that a character in a novel is a linguistic construct, part of an organized narrative system, an elaborate verbal structure–​–​the heroine is not “a person” but a device to support the narrative’s overall design. This way of reading character still has traction. In an influential book on all types of fictional creatures, John Frow writes that character is “a formal construct, made out of words or images and having a fully textual existence,” though its effects are “modelled on the form of the human person” (vi). Some critics contest the idea that characters became increasingly inward-​oriented and psychologized as the nineteenth-​century progressed, instead seeing characters in Victorian realist fiction “not as a hidden or buried kernel of personality, but instead as a socially determined material figuration … different, if not separate from, personality” (Brilmyer 71). As Frow puts it in Character and Person, character is “an evolving apparatus for the shaping of social arrangements” (71). Remove the entity known as “Dorothea Brooke” from the town of Middlemarch in the early 1830s, and she has no emotional existence, no interiority, no political meaning.

92  People Whether we should see literary characters as human beings, the fact is that many readers do see them that way. Characters in Victorian fiction have a way of persisting in the mind long after we have finished reading the book they are in. They may even develop an afterlife in the weird and wonderful worlds of neo-​Victorian fiction. Jane Eyre has reappeared, as star or cameo, in dozens of fictional spinoffs and rewrites, from Jean Rhys’s classic, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), to Emma Tennant’s Thornfield Hall (2003), to Sarah Shoemaker’s Mr. Rochester (2017).4 It is an open question whether Victorian characters remain themselves when they are planted in new soil by contemporary novelists, and even moreso when they are portrayed by film actors. Devoted readers of Brontë’s novel have very strong feelings about this! Yet the fact that Jane has been kept alive in so many imaginations tells us something about the durability and relevance of Brontë’s indomitable heroine. What makes a successful character in a Victorian novel? It depends on what you are looking for, and what kind of reader you are. If you are chiefly concerned with verisimilitude, you might evaluate characters based on how much they resemble real people you know, or how well they represent how people really were in the 1800s. If you are more concerned with having an enjoyable reading experience, you will evaluate characters based on the emotions they trigger in you, how involved you are in their lives. Some readers prioritize relatability. Others do not need to identify with characters, but simply like observing a variety of human types. Should a realistic character appear lifelike, or should the character produce lifelike feelings in the reader? I would like provisionally to entertain the latter position, that what you are feeling or thinking about the character–​–​what the character does to you–​–​is just as important as whether the character is a convincing imitation of a real person. For example, there is something in the character called Jane Eyre that continues to strike a deep chord in people. Readers genuinely care about Jane’s survival. When you feel that way about a character, you want to encourage or warn or admonish her because you feel she has a moral claim on you. But one thing you cannot do is revise her personality or change the course of events. You cannot turn her into someone else and more importantly you cannot judge her by the more liberal practices of our own time and place. It may be argued that Jane Eyre is a feminist novel, but Jane Eyre herself is not a sexually liberated twenty-​first century woman. You may want her to seize her happiness and run away with Rochester to that “whitewashed villa on the shores of the Mediterranean”–​–​I sure did, when I first read the novel–​–​but Jane will not do that, though she is sorely tempted (350). She loves this man. She desires him. His logic almost sways her. “Is it better to drive a fellow-​creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach?–​–​for you have neither relatives nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by living with me,” Rochester argues (365). But a still small voice inside of Jane knows that to go with him would constitute a betrayal of herself. “One drear word

People  93 comprised my intolerable duty–​–​‘Depart!’ ” (363). Jane will not be emotionally manipulated by him; she will stand up for herself, even though she loves him, even though no one would be injured by her choice, even though not a person in the world cares what happens to her. “Still indomitable was the reply—​ ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself’ ” (350). You go, Jane! This is why readers love her and are still inspired by her integrity. . When I teach classes on the Victorian novel, occasionally students become so frustrated with the stubborn immovability of literary creations from their fictional worlds that they feel real anguish and annoyance. As Umberto Eco writes, “fictional characters will never change and will remain the actors of what they did once and forever–​–​and it is because of the incorrigibility of their deeds that we can dare to say that it is true that they were or did this and that” (94). My students want to scream when Sue Bridehead perversely marries Mr. Phillotson; they can’t stand that Pip is blind to Estella’s cruelty; they root for Maggie Tulliver to run away and start a new life. I recall one student who insisted that Maggie could get out of St. Ogg’s and start a new life in London. That’s called reading a character outside the frame of the novel. This can happen when you feel so close to a character she seems like a real person. Alas, Sue Bridehead, Pip, and Maggie Tulliver are fettered to the nineteenth-​century world and its values, and we cannot pull them out. Andrew H. Miller has called this experience “readerly helplessness.” “My experience of fictional characters is conditioned throughout by the circumstances in which I encounter them, on the page, unembodied, silent,” he writes. They are “finished, complete, existing in the past” (123). Yet it has been suggested that this is exactly what gives great literary characters their value for us. “The devastating experience of discovering that, in spite of our wishes … things happened in that way, and forever, no matter what we wanted, hoped or yearned during the course of our reading,” says Eco, “makes us feel the shiver of Destiny” (96). Memorable literary characters, Eco believes, are thus paramount examples of the human condition. From the moral or humanist point of view, this is why they matter. Miller writes that Victorian novels invited nineteenth-​century people to imagine the characters they were reading about in relation to themselves, “either as perfectionist exemplars, images of lives they might lead in the future, or examples of lives they might have led but are not, now” (14). He thinks Victorian fiction may still function that way for readers today. If the Victorian novel can be a source of insight into how we might live our lives, or should have lived our lives, it is through our involvement with its characters. I would even go so far as to say that if you are not involved relationally with at least some of the characters in a Victorian novel, you’re not really reading it. Miller argues that Victorian writers relied on “the powers of our receptiveness to others” (6) in their creation of character–​–​in our susceptibility to models of human behavior that we can use, and in the fictional people we may imitate, strive to be, or shun. Our feelings and

94  People opinions about fictional people matter, especially when they are articulated in a wider social context, in a classroom, a blog, a book group. Indeed, even for the Victorians, gossiping about the characters in a new novel was a kind of social icebreaker. “A remarkable novel is a great event for English society. It is a kind of common friend, about whom people can speak the truth without fear of being compromised, and confess their emotions without being ashamed,” wrote Elizabeth Rigby in an 1848 review of Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre. We invite our neighbour to a walk with the deliberate and malicious object of getting thoroughly acquainted with him. We ask no impertinent questions,–​–​we proffer no indiscreet confidences—​we do not even sound him, ever so delicately, as to his opinion of a common friend … but we simply discuss Becky Sharp, or Jane Eyre, and our object is answered at once. (Tillotson 78) Casually chatting about fictional characters might be a circuitous way of learning about the character of someone you have just met–​–​another curiously reflexive form of character surveillance! As I noted in the chapter on plots, nineteenth-​century realist novels are often structured around a central character’s moral education and a moral conflict. These stories are concerned with a person’s journey on the winding, uphill path–​–​maybe maze is the better word–​–​toward self-​knowledge or moral self-​betterment. This particular concern certainly propels modernist and twentieth-​century fiction as well, and it may inform the organization of much twenty-​first century fiction. But the concern with how one chooses to live as a moral agent in the modern world truly drives Victorian fiction. Nineteenth-​century British society underwent unprecedented changes very quickly. Ordinary people could not easily process all the ways capitalism, technology, industry, science, and all matter of new forms of knowledge were shifting society’s values, almost invisibly. The Victorian reader worked through social and moral problems along with the characters. Characters in Victorian novels still can engage us and challenge us, ethically, emotionally, politically, and intellectually. When a nineteenth-​century reviewer calls a fictional person “disagreeable,” I always suspect that the reader did not know what he was supposed to think about the character and was knocked off balance. Yet to be vaguely disturbed by a character may be when the Victorian novel is doing its best ethical work by pressing the reader’s understanding and his capacity to discern the possible feelings and intentions of other people in a complex and psychologically demanding social network. When I teach Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights for example, students’ reactions to Heathcliff are all over the map. Some find him abhorrent, sadistic, and totally reprehensible. Others pity him deeply.

People  95 Most are simply confused; they commiserate with him as a victim of others’ cruelty, they admire his undying love for Catherine, but they are rattled by his total rejection of a moral code and disturbed by how viciously he treats other people. Heathcliff is a conundrum. In her 1850 Preface to Wuthering Heights, even Charlotte Brontë expressed reservations about her sister’s invention: “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know. I scarcely think it is” (liii). Reviewers thought Heathcliff “an incarnation of evil qualities,” and “a perfect monster, more demon than human.” “There is not in the entire dramatis personae [of Wuthering Heights] a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible. If you do not detest the person, you despise him; and if you do not despise him, you detest him with your whole heart,” wrote one critic, calling Heathcliff the “presiding evil genius of the piece.” Besides moral revulsion, there were readers who just thought Heathcliff wasn’t very believable: “[W]‌e entertain great doubts as to the truth, or rather the vraisemblance of the main character.” “Heathcliff might have been as unique a creation” as Catherine Earnshaw, wrote Sydney Dobell in 1850. The conception in his case was as wonderfully strong and original, but he is spoilt in detail. The authoress has too often disgusted, where she should have terrified, and has allowed us a familiarity with her fiend which has ended in unequivocal contempt. And yet many readers were spellbound by this character. “[D]‌evil though he be, he is drawn with a sort of dusky splendour which fascinates, and we feel the truth of his burning and impassioned love for Catherine, and of her inextinguishable love for him.”5 Is Heathcliff a hero or a villain, a man or a monster? Today’s undergraduates might be instructed to argue the point, but readers in 1847 were more interested in learning what the purpose was in creating such a character. What was the author trying to do or to say? The “incidents and persons are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive, the very best being improbable with a moral taint about them, and the villainy not leading to results sufficient to justify the elaborate pains taken in depicting it” (Allott 217). In 1847, a character such as Heathcliff was a startling new creation, and readers were perplexed and perturbed. Later in the century, after Charlotte’s death in 1855 and when reassessments of the Brontës were gathering steam, critics began to see something else in Heathcliff–​–​one writer even asserted he “has no match outside of Shakespeare.”6 We can compare him to nobody else among the creatures of fiction. We cannot even trace his literary pedigree. He is a distinct being, not less original than he is hateful. But this circumstance does not alter the fact that we accept him at once as a real being, not a merely grotesque monster. (Allott 401)

96  People Wuthering Heights generated healthy controversies about the conventions governing readers’ expectations about characters in realist novels, and about what literary characters can teach complacent readers about their own moral assumptions. In 1848, an admirer of Thackeray’s contradicted reviewers who claimed his books “contain too many disagreeable characters” by comparing Thackeray’s work to “the loathsome vulgarities of Wuthering Heights and Wildfell Hall” (Tillotson and Hawes 71). Thackeray created some very wicked people, but nothing as disgusting as the characters in those novels. Why were Thackeray’s bad people more acceptable to Victorian readers? For one thing, Thackeray wrote in the tradition of eighteenth-​century satire. He was not swayed by Byronic feeling or prone to gothic effects, and unlike the Brontës, he was at the center of a powerful and influential masculine literary culture. Thackeray earned his reputation as a great comic satirist through a series of short sketches published in Punch between 1845 and 1847, later collected in a single volume called The Book of Snobs. He was an author who wielded the pen to expose hypocrites, parvenus, upstarts, and fools. Thackeray was a critic of “Society,” as solid a moralist as they come. He was Charlotte Brontë’s hero–​–​indeed, she dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him. In his Preface to the 1848 edition of Vanity Fair, Thackeray refers to himself as the “Manager of the Performance” and to his characters as puppets. Throughout Vanity Fair, the narrator calls attention to this trope: my novel is a game, a little play, my characters are toys, puppets, and dolls. There is “the famous little Becky Puppet” who is so “uncommonly flexible in the joints, and lively on the wire,” and the “Dobbin Figure,” who though “apparently clumsy, yet dances in a very amusing and natural manner” (5–​6). You would think that calling attention to the novel’s artifice would undermine its seriousness and make the characters feel artificial. And yet despite Thackeray’s insouciance, Victorian readers raved about how delightfully real and true to life his characters were–​–​much more real than Dickens’s creations, you know. But comparing Dickens’s characters with Thackeray’s characters–​–​well, that could be the subject of a whole book. For as Virginia Woolf observed, with typical cogency, “There is nothing that people differ about more than the reality of characters.”7 Spotlight In an earlier chapter I cited Anthony Trollope’s claim that he was more interested in his characters than in his plots (and we’ve seen in this chapter what he thought of Dickens’s characters). Trollope knew well the conventions of novel-​ writing, and he liked to poke fun at himself in mild authorial asides a little like Thackeray’s–​–​in The Eustace Diamonds (1872), he even compares saucy Lady Eustace with “that opulent and aristocratic Becky Sharp,” the notorious heroine of Vanity Fair (19). Trollope pulls as many

People  97 puppet strings as Thackeray, but with a lighter hand. “It is ordained that all novels should have a male and a female angel and a male and a female devil,” says the narrator of Barchester Towers (264). He offers this novelistic dictum only to deflect it, for he is always insisting in his novels that people are not simply good or evil. He will offer the reader the egotism and worldliness of Archdeacon Grantley, the selfishness and bullying of Mrs. Proudie, the slimy underhandedness of horrid Mr. Slope, and the reader is invited to deliver a solid judgment on them. But no judgment can be the final one, for no character is completely one-​dimensional in Trollope. He wishes to show the reader that we are all implicated in moral questions and complexities, that to paint a character with a broad brush would belie human nature. Thus Mrs. Proudie “was not all devil. There was a heart inside that stiff-​ribbed bodice, though not, perhaps, of large dimensions, and certainly not easily accessible”; “And here the author must beg it to be remembered that Mr. Slope was not in all things a bad man. His motives, like those of most men, were mixed”; “Whatever might be his faults [the Archdeacon] was not an inhospitable man,” etc. (265, 136, 16). Each character has his or her part to play on the Barchester stage, with all its ecclesiastical and marital microaggressions and its jockeying for position. But no character is ironed out into a cardboard representative of greed, or ambition, or innocence. I find Trollope’s tongue-​in-​cheek frankness when he talks about his fictional people very entertaining. You can tell he really believes in them. It feels as if he is sitting down with the reader over a cup of tea for a good old-​fashioned gossip. “I have been able to imbue myself thoroughly with the characters I have had in hand,” he wrote in his Autobiography. “I have wandered alone among the rocks and woods, crying at their grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand, and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel” (161). Because Trollope has really lived with his characters, so does the reader. Everyone in a Trollope novel, no matter how nice or how bad they are, has a blind spot when it comes to their own nature and their own prejudices, and part of the pleasure and enlightenment in reading Trollope is watching characters stumble along toward some kind of self-​knowledge, accepting their limits, admitting their errors, or stubbornly not admitting them. Or maybe not yet, as some of Trollope’s people make appearances in the novels known as The Chronicles of Barsetshire. It is a wonderful and relaxing thing to live half the time in your own messy and difficult world and half the time in nineteenth-​century Barset, with Mr. Harding, Lily Dale, Johnny Eames, Mr. Crawley, and old Bunce, inhabitants of The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of Barset. If you want more, try the high-​stakes political world of the Palliser novels. When you read the whole series, you will feel not only

98  People that you know well some particular people–​–​Lady Glencora, Phineas Finn, Lord Fawn, Madame Max Goesler, and the rest–​–​but that you know People. Notes 1 Lewes, “Dickens in Relation to Criticism,” pp. 65–​ 6; Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists, p. 42; Orwell, “Charles Dickens,” p. 99. 2 A very good recent treatment of the subject is Paul Stasi’s The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction. 3 In Character, Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi explore new currents in character study, urging critics to crack the door a little to admit questions about readerly identification and characters’ psychology and moral lives. 4 A few global reworkings of Brontë’s novel are Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca (1938), Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing (1991), Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (2001), Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), Margot Livesay’s, The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012), Patricia Park’s Re Jane (2015), and Aline Brosh McKenna’s graphic novel, Jane (2017). 5 Quoted in Allott, The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, pp. 220, 298, 231, 221, 278, and 292. 6 Quoted in Watson, “ ‘Wuthering Heights’ and the Critics,” p. 247. 7 Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”

Works Cited Allott, Miriam, editor. The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1974. Anderson, Amanda, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi. Character. University of Chicago Press, 2019. Beasley, Edward. The Victorian Reinvention of Race. Routledge, 2010. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. 1861. Oxford University Press, 2012. Brilmyer, S. Pearl. “Plasticity, Form, and the Matter of Character in Middlemarch.” Representations, vol. 130, no. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 60–​83. Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 1847. Penguin, 1996. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Penguin, 2006. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Penguin, 1995. Carlyle, Thomas. “Sartor Resartus.” 1834. A Carlyle Reader, edited by G. B. Tennyson, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 122–​35. Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. 1865. W. W. Norton, 2013. Cecil, Lord David. Early Victorian Novelists. Bobbs-​Merrill, 1935. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. 1872, 1889. Oxford University Press, 1998. Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. 1850. W. W. Norton, 1990. Eco, Umberto. “On the Ontology of Fictional Characters: A Semiotic Approach.” Sign System Studies, vol. 37, nos. 1/​2 (2009), pp. 82–​97. Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. 1876. Penguin, 1995. —​—​—​. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. W. W. Norton, 1994. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. 1927. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955. Frow, John. Character and Person. Oxford University Press, 2014. Gissing, George. The Odd Women. 1893. Penguin, 1993.

People  99 Hartley, Lucy. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-​Century Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2001. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” 1884. The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Roger Gard, Penguin, 1987, pp. 186–​206. Lewes, George Henry. “Dickens in Relation to Criticism.” Fortnightly Review, vol. 11, no. 62 (Feb. 1872), pp. 141–​54. Lynn, Eliza. “Passing Faces.” Household Words, vol. 11, issue 265 (April 14, 1855), pp. 261–​64. Accessed at Internet Archive. Miller, Andrew H. The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-​ Century British Literature. Cornell University Press, 2011. Oliphant, Margaret. Miss Marjoribanks. 1866. Penguin, 1998. Orwell, George. “Charles Dickens,” A Collection of Essay, Harcourt Brace, 1946, pp. 48–​103. Stasi, Paul. The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2022. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. 1848. Penguin, 2001. Tillotson, Geoffrey and Donald Hawes, editors. Thackeray: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1968. Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. 1883. Penguin, 1993. —​—​—​. Barchester Towers. 1857. Oxford University Press, 1996. —​—​—​. The Eustace Diamonds. 1872. Oxford University Press, 1977. Vermeule, Blakey. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Watson, Melvin R. “‘Wuthering Heights’ and the Critics.” The Trollopian, vol. 3, no. 4 (March 1949), pp. 243–​63. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. University of California Press, 1957. Woolf, Virginia. “David Copperfield.” The Moment and Other Essays. 1947. Harcourt Brace, 1976, pp. 75–​80. —​ —​ —​ . “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” The Hogarth Press, 1924. Accessed at Project Gutenberg.

5 The Storytellers

How to tell the story is a novelist’s first decision, and Victorian novelists were very inventive in the ways they chose to frame and narrate their stories. This final chapter is about the narrative strategies used by novelists who were concerned with dissecting contemporary mores and social and political institutions, while at the same time probing the complexities of the individual psyche–​–​walking the narrow beam between how it is and how it feels, as all great novels do. Writers such as Dickens, the Brontës, Eliot, Collins, Thackeray, Gaskell, and Trollope were enabled in this task by their reinvention of a range of narrative styles that had been successfully deployed by their eighteenth-​century predecessors: fictional autobiographies, epistolary novels, multiple narrators, frame stories, diaries, free indirect discourse, and various uses of omniscience. These methods of narration were creatively revived to serve the Victorian writer’s two-​fold purpose of entertaining readers and presenting them with serious social analyses. To effectively exhibit, expose, and expound upon The Way We Live Now (to borrow a title from Trollope) depends largely on the purpose and demeanor of our escort through the fictional world–​–​that is, on the mode of narration. One effect of serial publication, as we’ve seen, was that over time a close bond developed between individual writers and their readers. This relationship was often augmented by the comforting authority of the third-​person omniscient narrator. The sense that there is a confident and all-​knowing person in control of events as they unfold in a long novel is one of the hallmarks of Victorian fiction. Wayne Booth, in his classic study The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), called this authorial presence the “implied author.” The implied author is the sense we have that there is “a choosing evaluating person” behind the rhetorical narrator who satisfies “the reader’s need to know where, in the world of values, he stands–​–​that is, to know where the author wants him to stand” (73–​4). Critics continue to debate the usefulness of the term, and Booth anticipated many of their objections.1 Nevertheless, the idea that a novel’s narrator presents readers with the author’s “second self,” and that readers have a relationship of some kind with that person, is an indispensable concept when we read Victorian fiction. The implied DOI: 10.4324/9781003388401-6

The Storytellers  101 author supplies “the norms which the reader must apprehend … if he is to grasp [the work] adequately.” He or she is the guiding voice that signals “the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all the characters,” and shapes the reader’s “intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole” (Booth 73). When you read a nineteenth-​century novel, you really have to listen to its voicings. Most Victorian novelists wanted to leave the reader better for having read them, to raise readers’ awareness and open up their minds. These motives are sometimes openly declared in the voice of a third-​person narrator. At the end of Hard Times (1854), for example, Dickens concludes with the heroine, Louisa Gradgrind, gazing into the fire “as in days of yore, though with a gentler and a humbler face. How much of the future might arise before her vision?” Herself again a wife—​a mother—​lovingly watchful of her children, ever careful that they should have a childhood of the mind no less than a childhood of the body …. Did Louisa see this? Such a thing was never to be. But, happy Sissy’s happy children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-​creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up … —​did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be. Dear reader! It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and cold. For some people, directly addressing the reader in this way may feel trite or pushy. Personally, I find the quiet urgency in the narrator’s voice quite moving and graceful. The twentieth-​century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch thought the nineteenth-​century novel possessed a great consoling power … a deep relaxing of tension, however alarming or horrible the events which are narrated, because of a sense of the strength of society, and of politics as a natural and ordinary part of the human scene. (222) Whether or not you agree with Murdoch–​–​maybe no work of fiction can adequately address, let alone relax, the tensions of twenty-​first-​century life–​–​ the authorial confidence of the Victorian novel may allow even the anxious modern reader to fall under the trance of the storyteller. By the early twentieth century, the overtly moralistic, explanative narrative voice that all but defined the mid-​Victorian novel was out of style. Tedious, maudlin, or obstructive, it was thought that such narration mars

102  The Storytellers the seamless web of subject matter and treatment that should make up the unity and formal coherence of the work. Authors who load the dice, who take sides for or against their characters or push the reader’s sympathies and judgments risk compromising the reader’s emotional involvement in what Henry James called “the intensity of the illusion” (Booth 42–​3). And it is true that a bad intrusive style can impede other desired effects and even ruin the story the narrator was ostensibly there to serve. Yet sometimes a narrator’s interventions may be crucial to the novel’s purpose–​–​indeed, in a long multi-​ plot novel such as Middlemarch or Our Mutual Friend the engaging, all-​ knowing voice of the omniscient narrator is what holds the story together. Some omniscient narrators, Booth argues, perform a kind of function in their works that nothing else could perform. They are not simply appropriate to a context, though that is essential. They originally succeeded and still succeed by persuading the reader to accept them as living oracles. They are reliable guides not only to the world of the novels in which they appear but also to the moral truths of the world outside the book. (220–​1) To contemporary readers accustomed to postmodern irony, a Victorian narrator’s conviction and insight can feel solid and reassuring, or it can feel corny and contrived. But the fact remains that Victorian novelists are decidedly reliant on cultivating a confiding and intimate rapport with the reader. If you enter a Victorian novel in a spirit of resistance or skepticism your reading experience will be diminished for many reasons, but chiefly because you have forestalled on your relationship with the narrator, whether that is a third-​person all-​knowing voice or the first-​person voice in a fictional autobiography. It is ill-​advised to confuse the narrator of any novel with the actual author, of course. The voicings in a work of fiction are verbal constructions. “The narrator is a role the novelist plays, an invented personality who is often granted within the looking-​glass world of the novel certain unique powers, powers of ubiquity in space and time, powers of direct access to other minds,” explains J. Hillis Miller (2). Yet when we read those big Victorian classics–​–B ​ leak House, Middlemarch, The Way We Live Now–​–​we do tend to equate the voice that is telling the story with the feelings and beliefs held by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope, much as Victorian readers did. We do this “intuitively,” as Booth says, because of the perceived closeness between the values of the omniscient narrator and those of the implied author. The “convention of the omniscient authorial voice favoured by Dickens and most other Victorian novelists encouraged their readers to feel that the text they held in their hands was a direct line to a real human being,” writes the novelist and critic David Lodge, “–​–​that the ‘Charles Dickens’ whose name appeared on the title page of the novel was identical

The Storytellers  103 with the person who actually wrote it” (122). This was certainly the case with Dickens, who wrote to John Forster of “that particular relation (personally affectionate and like no other man’s) which subsists between me and the public” (Forster 198). The eminent Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton wrote in 1868, “No one thinks first of Mr. Dickens as a writer. He is at once, through his books, a friend. He belongs among the intimates of every pleasant-​tempered and large-​hearted person” (P. Collins 1). The warm feeling of knowing an author through his books can become awkward when readers encounter him face to face, “warts and all,” or when uncomfortable details of his private life become the subject of public gossip (as happened to Dickens when he separated from his wife Catherine after twenty-​two years of marriage). But in the Victorian reader’s imagination, the sense of connection with an author could feel genuine, personal, and confidential. This is William Thackeray in his Preface to The History of Pendennis (1850) explaining–​–​ as many Victorian novelists did in their Prefaces–​–​that he has meant to be friendly, fair, and honest and to paint a true portrait of society: In his constant communication with the reader, the writer is forced into frankness of expression, and to speak out his own mind and feelings as they urge him. … It is a sort of confidential talk between writer and reader, which must often be dull, must often flag. In the course of his volubility, the perpetual speaker must of necessity lay bare his own weaknesses, vanities, peculiarities. And as we judge of a man’s character, after long frequenting his society, not by one speech, or by one mood or opinion, or by one day’s talk, but by the tenor of his general bearing and conversation; so of a writer, who delivers himself up to you perforce unreservedly, you say, Is he honest? Does he tell the truth in the main? Does he seem actuated by a desire to find out and speak it? Is he a quack, who shams sentiment, or mouths for effect? Does he seek popularity by claptraps or other arts? (33) A novelist may have many flaws as a human being, but his literary persona on the page is what matters. Is he trustworthy? Is he sincere? Indeed, as Booth notes, the best and most honorable moments of an author’s life may well be when she or he is writing a novel with a clear moral intention (Booth 75). In the nineteenth century, a growing public trust in scientific thinking assured people that the world was knowable, that problems could be analyzed and that practical means were available to solve them. In the novel, omniscient narration, told from one steadfast perspective, backed up this epistemological confidence: reality can be apprehended, the truth about human affairs can be told, and such knowledge and truth can be shared collectively. J. Hillis Miller has argued that the omniscient narrator in nineteenth century novels is a spokesperson for the collective consciousness of the community, the voice of society.2 The narrator not only privileges the reader with a glimpse into

104  The Storytellers her characters’ private thoughts and feelings using free indirect style, but she also interprets those thoughts and feelings and utters wise commentary on the meaning of events as we go along. Victorian novels, writes Miller, exploited the fact that language allows us to imagine that we can have direct access to another mind (3). Contemporary writers who work in the realist tradition use indirect discourse all the time, of course. But we live in a very different age, one permeated by skepticism, anxiety, and doubt about what we can know and how much we can control. Only very rarely in modern and contemporary fiction do we encounter third-​ person narrators who possess the certainty–​–​some would say the preachiness–​–​of the narrators in Victorian novels. And unless it’s done ironically, it is no longer the fashion to address the reader directly or to tell her what to think. Victorian omniscience, though, is not one thing only, and novelists have very different styles, tones, strategies, and intentions. Jane Austen died in 1817, twenty years before Victoria became queen. Her work was not well known until the Victorian publisher Richard Bentley released a set of illustrated editions of her novels in the 1830s which drew thousands of curious readers. By the 1870s, with the publication of Memoir of Jane Austen, by her nephew James Edward Austen-​Leigh, “dear Aunt Jane” was back in style–​–​and on her way to being one of England’s most famous and beloved authors. Some Victorian critics liked to compare the novels of Anthony Trollope to Jane Austen’s. Both novelists take as their subject English domestic life and the social tactics and maneuverings of men and women from the middle or upper classes. Like Austen, Trollope writes “in a broad and genial spirit” without expounding “esoteric doctrines,” as one Victorian reviewer put it (Smalley 467). Also like Austen, Trollope is good at revealing shades of character in an amusing and sometimes wry tone of voice, and both writers tell their stories in the reliable third person, using free indirect style to enter the minds of the main characters In Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), the heroine Elizabeth Bennet experiences a moment of excruciating shame and self-​awareness when she realizes she has been “blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd” in her judgment of Mr. Darcy (201). In Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (1865), the heroine, Alice Vavasor, has promised to marry her unsavory yet intense cousin, George Vavasor, after breaking off her engagement to the impeccably kind if slightly dull John Gray. Now she realizes with piercing humility that George is the wrong man for her, and though she would help him as a friend, she can never submit to him as a wife. Trollope’s narrator uses free indirect style here to enter his heroine’s mind in her moments of agonizing self-​scrutiny: Was she to give herself bodily,—​body and soul, as she said aloud in her solitary agony,—​to a man whom she did not love? Must she submit to his caresses,—​lie on his bosom,—​turn herself warmly to his kisses? “No,” she

The Storytellers  105 said, “no,”—​speaking audibly, as she walked about the room; “no;—​it was not in my bargain; I never meant it.” But if so what had she meant;—​ what had been her dream? Of what marriage had she thought, when she was writing that letter back to George Vavasor? How am I to analyse her mind, and make her thoughts and feelings intelligible to those who may care to trouble themselves with the study? Any sacrifice she would make for her cousin which one friend could make for another. She would fight his battles with her money, with her words, with her sympathy. She would sit with him if he needed it, and speak comfort to him by the hour. His disgrace should be her disgrace;—​his glory her glory;—​his pursuits her pursuits. Was not that the marriage to which she had consented? But he had come to her and asked her for a kiss, and she had shuddered before him, when he made the demand. Then that other one [John Gray] had come and had touched her hand, and the fibres of her body had seemed to melt within her at the touch, so that she could have fallen at his feet. (383) Alice wants to help her cousin as would a friend, but she realizes with something like horror that she cannot bear to be kissed by him–​–​quite an important realization for a woman to have before she commits to marrying someone. On the other hand, unexciting, loyal John Gray (his name says it all) merely touched her hand, and to her surprise it was a total turn-​on. One problem opens the door to many for this heroine, though: She had done very wrong. She knew that she had done wrong. She knew that she had sinned with that sin which specially disgraces a woman. She had said that she would become the wife of a man to whom she could not cleave with a wife’s love; and, mad with a vile ambition, she had given up the man for whose modest love her heart was longing. She had thrown off from her that wondrous aroma of precious delicacy, which is the greatest treasure of womanhood. She had sinned against her sex; and, in an agony of despair, as she crouched down upon the floor with her head against her chair, she told herself that there was no pardon for her. She understood it now, and knew that she could not forgive herself. But can you forgive her, delicate reader? Or am I asking the question too early in my story? For myself, I have forgiven her. The story of the struggle has been present to my mind for many years, —​and I have learned to think that even this offence against womanhood may, with deep repentance, be forgiven. And you also must forgive her before we close the book, or else my story will have been told amiss. (383–​4) Alice is racked with confusion, remorse, and womanly shame. The reader is intended to feel her restless misery as she paces the room and speaks aloud her thoughts–​–​and we do. But when the narrator addresses the “delicate

106  The Storytellers reader” directly and explains how he feels about Alice’s difficulty and how he wants you to feel about her, does it kill the vibe? “And you also must forgive her before we close the book,” says Trollope, “or else my story will have been told amiss.” We are exactly halfway through the novel (“Or am I asking the question too early in my story?”) and the author has answered for the reader the intriguing question posed in the novel’s splendid title. Delicate reader, says Trollope, you must forgive her, or you will have missed the whole point of my book! What Trollope does here is a crystal-​clear instance–​–​though by no means the most extreme instance in Trollope–​–​of the kind of butting-​in Henry James so much disliked. James thought the narrator’s good-​natured commentary shatters the illusion of reality and breaks our emotional connection to the character. Anthony Trollope, James complained in 1883, “delighted wantonly to violate” the customary precautions taken by all good novelists for supporting the illusion that what he was telling the reader had really happened. He took a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-​believe. He habitually referred to the work in hand (in the course of that work) as a novel, and to himself as a novelist, and was fond of letting the reader know that this novelist could direct the course of events according to his pleasure. Trollope’s habit of breaking the fourth wall is to James a “pernicious trick.” His “little slaps at credulity” are “discouraging,” “inexplicable,” and “deliberately inartistic.” Is not the first duty of a novelist to “relate events that are assumed to be real”? When Trollope “suddenly winks at us and reminds us that he is telling us an arbitrary thing, we are startled and shocked” (177–​ 8). James had some nice things to say about Trollope, too, but he had no patience with his quirky habit of commenting on the novel he was writing while he was writing it. (For the record, he also thought Jane Austen tipped her hand too much.)3 Trollope’s self-​conscious impulse does not bother me when I read his novels. I find it both endearing and funny when the narrator prompts or advises the reader to pay attention to something or points proudly at his fabrications. Yes, there are times Trollope’s narrators protest a little too much–​–​as in the long opening paragraph to Chapter 9 called “In medias res,” in The Duke’s Children (1880), where the narrator discusses at leisure the advantages and drawbacks of beginning a story in the middle of the plot and dodging “the difficulties and dangers, the tedium and prolixity, of description” (69). But, says the narrator, as readers seem to like this tried-​and-​true method, “I will do it once again,—​trying it only for a branch of my story” (69), and so after his digression on in medias res, the narrator presents in medias res a remark by Lady Mabel Grex to young Lord Silverbridge. Very meta-​metafictional!

The Storytellers  107 Highly esteemed Victorian novelists stepped in to comment on their stories in this way–​ –​ I’ve mentioned already George Eliot’s long digression on art and realism in Adam Bede (the chapter’s title is, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little”). The so-​called intrusive narrator is a common convention of much Victorian fiction, though personally I think intrusive is a bit pejorative. Why not neighborly, or even collaborative? At one point in Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis, the narrator begins a paragraph, “&c. &c. &c.: let the reader fill up these details according to his liking and experience of village scandal” (170). Talk about destroying the illusion! But Thackeray’s narrators belong in a class of their own, and can be trickier and more ambiguous than Trollope’s. As I mentioned in the last chapter, in Vanity Fair Thackeray deploys the trope of the Manager of the Performance, the novelist as a puppet-​master, all-​knowing and facetiously manipulative. He pulls back the curtain before the stage to reveal his cast of characters: cunning Becky Sharp, meek Amelia Sedley, ludicrous Jos, loyal Dobbin, wicked Lord Steyne, etc. But at various points this narrator also walks onto the stage himself, pretending to be a character who has met Amelia and Dobbin, talking about his (fictional) wife and family, getting the scoop from a busybody named Tom Eaves. He flaunts his omniscience (“understanding with the omniscience of the novelist …” [171]; “The novelist, who knows everything, knows this also …” [378]), yet he often admits his ignorance or declines to take responsibility for his creations (“the reader must bear in mind that it is always Tom Eaves who speaks …” [546]), as if the characters had a will of their own. Thackeray’s narrator both flatters and mocks the reader of Vanity Fair, who is addressed at various times as a refined lady, a sentimental servant girl, or a supercilious gentleman named Jones who, reading the novel at his London club, judges it excessively foolish, trivial, twaddling, and ultra-​sentimental. Yes; I can see Jones at this minute (rather flushed with his joint of mutton and half pint of wine), taking out his pencil and scoring under the words “foolish, twaddling,” etc. and adding to them his own remark of “quite true”. (12) The narrator pretends that he is indifferent or neutral towards the absurd goings-​on he describes, but he also seems to enjoy his characters’ wickedness. The fact that Thackeray supplied his own illustrations to accompany the serial just adds another layer of ambiguity. The endpiece to Chapter 9, for example, appears to be a self-​portrait of the author as a court jester who has just removed his mask. A visual metaphor for the omniscient narrator’s capacity to strip away deception and expose the truth? Or a wide-​eyed confession of bewilderment as to which face is the real one?4 As I mentioned in the last chapter, Thackeray was celebrated in his lifetime as a brilliant moralist. Do the tongue-​ in-​ cheek contradictions and

108  The Storytellers

Figure 5.1 William Makepeace Thackeray, possible self-​ portrait, Vanity Fair, Chapter 9.

inconsistencies of the narrator of Vanity Fair jeopardize or discredit the novel’s serious aims? Readers have responded very differently to this novel. Some are turned off by what they perceive as Thackeray’s joking cynicism, while others see the narrator as the moral center of the book. In her classic study, The English Novel: Form and Function (1953), Dorothy Van Ghent expressed her abhorrence for the “omniscient author convention,” and singled out Thackeray’s comments in Vanity Fair as “inane and distracting.” “What we feel is that two orders of reality are clumsily getting in each other’s way: the order of imaginative reality, where Becky lives, and the order of historical reality, where William Makepeace Thackeray lives” (139).5 The distinguished critic Harold Bloom, on the other hand, praised “the gusto of the doubtlessly fictive Thackeray who is the narrator, and who shares many of the weaknesses that he zestfully portrays in his women and men,” arguing that readers cannot help liking the conniving heroine because “we like that supreme fiction, Thackeray the narrator” (2). You cannot read Vanity Fair without eventually coming to grips with that meddlesome narrator and his tricks and transmutations. “Sometimes I wish that he would stop teasing me,” Bloom admits.

The Storytellers  109 But never, in Vanity Fair, do I wish Thackeray the storyteller to clear out of the novel. If you are going to tour Vanity Fair, then your best guide is its showman, who parodies it yet always acknowledges that he himself is one of its prime representatives. (2) Harold Bloom is beguiled and entertained by the supreme fictionality of Vanity Fair’s narrative voice. Dorothy Van Ghent is annoyed. And yet even Bloom confesses something is lacking: “always I wish that his moralizing were in a class with those of the sublime George Eliot” (2). Ah, yes. Sympathetic, witty, judicious, intelligent, and deeply humane, George Eliot’s narrators display authorial control par excellence. The narrator in her novels is consistently a comforting, firm, and governing presence, a voice that quietly guides the reader’s moral response while never flaunting her wisdom or nudging you in the ribs by making a parade of her fictionality. Eliot’s Middlemarch is widely considered to be one of the very greatest Victorian novels. Set just before the passage of the first Reform Bill of 1832, its subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life,” suggests a careful dissection of English society during a period of unprecedented change. The scope of Middlemarch is comprehensive. In a letter to her publisher, John Blackwood, Eliot wrote, “There are to be eight … bi-​monthly parts, so you perceive it will be a frightfully long book. But I wanted to give a panoramic view of provincial life, which could not be done in a small space” (Letters 238). A panorama, as we know, is a sweeping perspective taking in many different scenes at once, both large public events and small private ones. In Middlemarch, Eliot’s narrator is able to zoom out to show the reader a political rally or a meeting in a boardroom and then zoom in to explore the interstices of a single character’s mind and feelings. The novel is chiefly concerned with the fate of its warm, idealistic heroine, Dorothea Brooke, but the narrator of Middlemarch gives almost every important character a turn, not only offering us a privileged view into the person’s inner life but also commentating on how that life could most sympathetically be comprehended. “If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” Eliot wrote in a letter to Charles Bray in 1859. The only effect I ardently long to produce in my writings is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from them in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures. (Eliot 526) You may think the town beauty, Rosamond Vincy, is superficial and manipulative, or that Dorothea’s uncle, Mr. Brooke, has a touch of foolish pomposity, or that the doctor, Tertius Lydgate, is a little sexist–​–​and you think these things because the narrator has hinted as much. But Eliot wants to bring you

110  The Storytellers up short in your judgments and your prejudices about other people, and to get you to imagine what it is like to be Rosamond or Lydgate or Mr. Brooke. Or the Reverend Edward Casaubon. A man of “profound learning” (7), about forty-​five years old, with iron-​grey hair and deep eye-​sockets, dignified in manner and in speech, serious, well-​off in the world, slightly authoritative, Casaubon is twenty-​seven years older than Dorothea, who marries him because she wishes to improve her mind and do something meaningful with her life. Acting as her husband’s secretary as he completes his monumental work, The Key to All Mythologies, seems the best she can do under the circumstances. Almost every person in Middlemarch finds Mr. Casaubon terribly dull and physically unattractive, with his moles, his bony frame, and his sallow complexion, and they cannot understand Dorothea’s motive in accepting such a grave and morose man, so much older than she and “a little buried in books,” as her uncle says (25). Casaubon will never make an impassioned young woman like Dorothea happy. And indeed, while on her honeymoon in Rome, when Dorothea discovers that her husband is not all she had thought him to be, she begins to feel profoundly depressed. Eliot often takes the reader inside Dorothea’s thoughts, dissecting this calamitous union with great moral perception and mature understanding. When I teach Middlemarch, some students express a dislike for Mr. Casaubon that borders on disgust: he’s an emotional blackmailer, a tyrant, dull as dirt, there’s no sex. Poor Dorothea! But Eliot’s engaging narrator demands more ethically from the reader of Middlemarch. Chapter 29 begins, One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea—​but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? … In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia, and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James, Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-​hungered like the rest of us. (175) The reader must try to understand what the world looks like through Mr. Casaubon’s eyes. He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life. To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-​ consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-​like in small currents of self-​preoccupation or at best

The Storytellers  111 of an egoistic scrupulosity. … For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self. (176) Eliot does not use free indirect style to reveal Mr. Casaubon’s mental suffering. She movingly explains, philosophically and metaphorically, that this is the kind of person he is, his soul is like a hatchling that can’t lift off, he is weighed down, insecure, highly sensitive, incapable of spontaneity, afraid of being pitied, morally and emotionally hemmed in. Poor Mr. Casaubon, indeed. Instead of reviling him, the narrator feels sorry for him–​–​he has married an ardent young woman after a life of solitary bachelorhood, he has no conception of love or passion and no understanding of what it means to share your life with someone. Without a moral or emotional model for how to do this thing, he becomes only stiffer in his “egoistic scrupulosity” and more demanding of his wife. And the deeper he went in domesticity the more did the sense of acquitting himself and acting with propriety predominate over any other satisfaction. Marriage … was fated to become an outward requirement, and Edward Casaubon was bent on fulfilling unimpeachably all requirements. (177) When Eliot’s narrator says, “Poor Mr. Casaubon!” (at least seven times), the reader is meant to condole with this character a little, for along with everyone else, including the reader of Middlemarch, Mr. Casaubon is trapped inside his ego, fatally limited in his perspective. “Poor Mr. Casaubon felt (and must not we, being impartial, feel with him a little?) …” asks the narrator soothingly (234). Yet it is a fact that some readers remain stubbornly unsympathetic to Mr. Casaubon, no matter how much the narrator pleads for him. Are they bad readers of Middlemarch? I do not think so. The narrator’s presumed impartiality may present a problem for readers who do not share her moral perspective or her political judgments. You can be turned off by the narrator’s cajoling ways and her moral injections–​–​a distinctive characteristic of Eliot’s narration. She often inserts philosophical comments that spring from the fictional situations she has created but which may be applied to life in general: “We are all of us born into moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves” (135); “For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them” (55); “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (124). It is true that very many readers go to George Eliot because they appreciate penetrating insights such as these. There are moments in Middlemarch in

112  The Storytellers which the narrator possesses the depth, calmness, and vision of a sage. But you are allowed to feel manipulated, too. Eliot’s narrator, like the omniscient narrators in novels by Trollope and Thackeray, is a mediating presence in the novel. The voice we hear is not neutral and objective, but a particular consciousness in the act of interpreting the world–​–​not only the narrow world of Middlemarch, but the wider world of history, society, art, politics–​–​and this particular consciousness places great stress on the need for cooperative sympathy in creating genuine community. George Eliot was a secular humanist and a realist. She comprehended what she calls in Middlemarch the “element of tragedy” (124) in all human life and her novels are usually about people, often women, who are constrained by their environment or their circumstances from living full and autonomous lives. But the tragic view of human life is not universally held. The early twentieth-​century backlash against Eliot was usually based on her sad-​faced moralizing. “During the 1920s, when other Victorians were rediscovered, George Eliot remained in eclipse,” writes Gordon Haight, Eliot’s biographer. “Her insistence on moral principles bored a generation that had done with morality” (xiii). Eliot was considered unreadable and unread. In 1934, Lord David Cecil claimed, It is not just that she is not read, that her books stand on the shelves unopened. If people do read her, they do not enjoy her. … The virtues of her admiration, industry, self-​restraint, conscientiousness, are drab, negative sort of virtues; they are school-​teachers’ virtues. (Haight xiv) On the other hand, when the eminent British scholar F. R. Leavis re-​evaluated her work at mid-​century, he called Eliot’s moral perspective the essence of her superiority. In the twenty-​first century, Eliot’s reputation is more than secure. In 2015, a BBC Culture poll asked 82 book critics from outside the United Kingdom to name the best 100 British novels. Middlemarch was voted number one.6 Narrative omniscience, then, reflects the mid-​Victorian faith in science as an objective means of understanding the world: there is an observable, measurable “reality” that could be known and shared. The same might be said for novels with multiple narrators, especially when they are composed of fictional diaries, letters, and other documents that are assembled for the purpose of uncovering the truth or providing a record of the facts. Victorian multinarrator novels habitually explain how, when, where, and why documents have been written, collected, transcribed, or delivered (usually by an editor or the friend to whom the narrative will be given), and some make free use of footnotes, maps, family trees, and other paratextual apparatus. Alexandra Valint calls this departure from omniscience a “shift from moral realism to realism of method” (32), citing Robert Louis Stevenson’s note to

The Storytellers  113 The Master of Ballantrae about his “natural love for the documentary method in narration” (32–​3). But just as with omniscience, Victorian novelists had very different aims and strategies in the use of multiple narrators. In Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, mentioned in the previous chapter, the story is framed as a series of letters from Gilbert Markham to his friend Halford about a mysterious woman and her young son who have moved into Wildfell Hall, “a superannuated mansion of the Elizabethan era” two miles outside the village (22). In Chapter 15, Helen gives Markham a thick manuscript–​–​her diary–​–​and for many chapters the novel recounts in Helen’s voice the story of her abusive husband and her flight (this information is supposedly enclosed in Gilbert’s letters to Halford, despite Helen’s appeal to “Bring it back when you have read it; and don’t breathe a word of what it tells you to any living being” [129]). In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean’s narrative is contained inside Mr. Lockwood’s frame story, which also enfolds Isabella Linton’s letter to Nelly recounting her marriage to Heathcliff as well as Catherine Earnshaw’s childhood diary–​–​ though unlike Anne Brontë’s novel, Lockwood never tells the reader why he is writing or to whom. In Dickens’s Little Dorrit, instead of using free indirect style to explain Miss Wade’s anger at the world, Dickens has her give Arthur Clennam her diary in a chapter called “The History of a Self-​Tormenter.” The first-​person perspective takes the reader inside the character’s psychology, almost like an interpolated tale. Even Trollope, who stuck to the third-​person point of view in the vast majority of his forty-​seven novels,7 regularly played with multivocality, for he loved to present the reader with his characters’ written correspondence, sometimes with a little authorial excuse: “Before they started there came a letter to Nora from Dorothy, which shall be given entire, because it will tell the reader more of Dorothy’s happiness than would be learned from any other mode of narrative” (He Knew He Was Right 623). Presenting the reader with letters is one of Trollope’s favorite shortcuts (fitting for a man who worked for the post office for thirty-​two years). Needless to say, it is something Henry James would never do. The use of multiple narrators and frame stories developed from eighteenth-​ century epistolary novels, Gothic tales, and fictional confessions and memoirs. In the Victorian period, multiple narration was exploited by some of the most clever and skilled Victorian novelists of mystery, horror, and detection, including Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Collins, especially, was wildly inventive in his management of multivocality. His second novel, Basil (1852), is a fictional confession written by the overwrought hero of the title, interspersed with journal entries, letters, a long confession from Basil’s enemy, and even a newspaper report. Toward the end of the novel, Basil has a nervous breakdown after he witnesses his rival’s violent death from falling into a chasm during a storm. He is haunted by nightmare visions of the man’s “two livid and bloody hands tossed up against the black walls of the hole, as he dropped into it” (326). His journal becomes increasingly fragmented:

114  The Storytellers Worse! worse! I have forgotten what day of the month it is; and cannot remember it for a moment together, when they tell me—​cannot even recollect how long I have been confined to my bed. I feel as if my heart was wasting away. Oh! if I could only see Clara again. * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The doctor and a strange man have been looking among my papers. My God! am I dying? dying at the very time when there is a chance of happiness for my future life? … * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Clara! I shall die out of my senses, unless Clara—​ break the news gently—​it may kill her—​ Her face so bright and calm! her watchful, weeping eyes always looking at me, with a light in them that shines steady through the quivering tears. While the light lasts, I shall live; when it begins to die out—​* (329) The asterisk indicates a NOTE BY THE EDITOR. “There are some lines of writing beyond this point; but they are illegible” (329). With his narrator now mentally incapacitated, Collins had to figure out how to tell the rest of the story. Fast forward nine years: Basil writes a letter to his editor enclosing several other letters that were written immediately after his illness by some humble people who looked after him, which, fortunately, they had preserved: “I asked permission to take copies of these two documents, as containing materials, which I could but ill supply from my own resources, for filling up a gap in my story,” he explains (340). (The letter writers ask him to polish their homely writing and turn it into “proper reading,” but he declines.) The novel ends with instructions to his friend for publishing his book and passionate entreaties that nothing in it be altered and “to allow of no cringing beforehand to anticipated incredulities. What I have written is Truth” (340). Basil is a strange and strangely fascinating novel, especially from a psychoanalytic angle. Framing the story as a fictional memoir permitted Collins to explore extreme mental and emotional conditions, including sexual obsession, guilt, and paranoia. In his later and more successful works, Collins frequently constructed the plot around documents and letters to build up interest and suspense, making readers piece together the truth from different limited points of view. Victorian novelists who chose this method of narration could explore the fallibility of memory and the mind’s susceptibility to impressions and suggestions. This technique also allowed them to give voice to marginalized people: servants, the physically and mentally disabled, people of different ethnicities. Collins’s The Moonstone, the novel I spotlighted in Chapter 2, achieves radical multivocality by giving part of the narration to effeminate, awkward Ezra Jennings, with his “piebald hair, and the gipsy complexion” (he solves the mystery), and to Rosanna Spearman, a misfit just out of a reformatory, “with a plain face and a deformed shoulder” (327, 35). In Collins’s bestselling fifth

The Storytellers  115 novel, The Woman in White (1860), the drawing teacher Walter Hartright narrates the longest sections, but seven other narrators are brought on to testify as well, and in the “Second Epoch” of the mystery, we receive written testimonials from a doctor, an illiterate cook, a housekeeper, and even a tombstone! The young Henry James noted with some admiration that The Woman in White, “with its diaries and letters and its general ponderosity, was a kind of nineteenth-​century version of Clarissa Harlowe” with a dash of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) thrown in. “Mind, we say a nineteenth century version,” noted James. “To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors. This innovation gave a new impetus to the literature of horrors” (Page 119). You could say that the use of multiple narrators in a mystery or detective story upholds the assumption that an objective account of the world is possible: all the facts line up to reveal the truth of the case. On the other hand, the use of multiple narrators may destabilize this very belief by presenting so many subjective points of view–​–​opening the door to epistemological uncertainty and to doubts about what actually constitutes “reality.” If the letter-​writers and diarists in multivocal, multi-​plot novels suggest that the self may be no more than an elaborate and self-​justifying fiction, the first-​person narrators in many Victorian novels contradict this idea: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Bleak House (of which more later), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), and yes, Wilkie Collins’s Basil: open to the first page of any of these novels and you find yourself in the presence of a single voice, a single self: There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question. (Jane Eyre, Chapter 1) Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously. (David Copperfield, Chapter 1) I am a Cockney among Cockneys. Italy and the Tropics, the Highlands and Devonshire, I know only in dreams. Even the Surrey Hills, of whose loveliness I have heard so much, are to me a distant fairy-​land, whose

116  The Storytellers gleaming ridges I am worthy only to behold afar. With the exception of two journeys, never to be forgotten, my knowledge of England is bounded by the horizon which encircles Richmond Hill. (Alton Locke, Chapter 1) The literary scholar Heidi Pennington has argued persuasively that these types of novel openings stimulate the reader almost unconsciously to ask a question fundamental to the novel’s primary concern: the nature of personal identity, the question of how someone becomes who they are or who they will be. In the famous opening sentences of Jane Eyre, for example, with no descriptive introduction to time or place, and referring to no other human agents, the reader is already being prepared for the gaps yet to be filled in the fictional world (Pennington 3). Who are you? Why are you speaking? These are the triggers in Victorian first-​person novels, and specifically in novels that follow the trajectory of a character’s entire life, from childhood to adulthood. Fictional autobiographies such as Jane Eyre and David Copperfield were hugely popular throughout the nineteenth century, and as Rachel Ablow has suggested, for many readers today “the autobiographical voice is the voice of the nineteenth-​century novel” (274). These were novels by artistically self-​conscious authors, and to some readers they represent the crowning achievements of the genre. Indeed, the astonishing success of Jane Eyre in 1847 opened the floodgates: reviews of popular mid-​century fiction sometimes complained that there were suddenly dozens of mediocre novels written in the style of an autobiography, especially by women writers. What is it about this mode of narration that gives so many readers such pleasure or stirs their interest so intensely? One reason may be the unrepressed expression of emotion first-​person narration permits. In non-​ fictional Victorian biographies by intellectuals such as John Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman, Charles Darwin, or Harriet Martineau, the public and professional person is what matters–​–​the contributions made to society, the perspective given on history or politics. In the fictional first-​person autobiography, how the narrator feels about what is happening is just as important as the events that are unfolding–​–​ indeed, much more so. The form had a special charm for readers because of the intimacy constructed “between fictive teller and actual reader, which increases both the excitement of the reading experience and the reader’s sense of the narrative’s authenticity” (Pennington 44). Pennington cites an anonymous reviewer in the Times who described Rhoda Broughton’s novel Cometh Up as a Flower: An Autobiography (1867) as an “autobiographical form of narrative, or, as children more simply style it, ‘An I story.’ ” The reviewer notes that among the disadvantages attending the autobiographical novel is that “The ‘I’ of the book ought to be especially interesting. He (or she) is almost necessarily the most prominent character, for he must be present at every incident, and take the lead in every conversation.” The author notes that this necessity for the narrator to be simultaneously the protagonist places certain narrative rigors and constraints on the flesh-​and-​blood author.

The Storytellers  117 Yet the reader is drawn to the autobiographical novel precisely because of the excitement “I” narration promises (Pennington 41). Some critics also thought first-​person, autobiographical novels were even more believable than omniscient narration. Unlike most all-​knowing (if not all-​telling) narrators, “fictional autobiographers are frequently accounting for the sources of their knowledge and making clear gestures to maintain standards of real-​world epistemology” (Pennington 42). They also have to credibly explain their motives, choices, reactions, and desires. Thus the reader’s emotional involvement is heightened because we are “permitted to hold actual converse” (as a Times reviewer put it) with the fictional being who both acts in the story and narrates those actions. Fictional autobiographies, especially the bildungsroman, or story of development, have a forward trajectory–​–​in learning the way of the world the hero or heroine grows into maturity and self-​knowledge. But because these novels are retrospective in structure, there is usually a distinction between the present, narrating self and past selves. The reader is continually reminded about the relationship between the two perspectives, and that what happened in the past continues to affect the present. Thus the poignancy of Great Expectations comes from mature Pip’s shame and his too-​late understanding of his misjudgments of people, especially his ingratitude to Joe. First-​person narrators may also reflect on the fact that they are reconstructing their lives from memory, selecting from all the days and weeks and years they have lived the events that have shaped them, and what has linked those events together. In Jane Eyre, Jane pauses to explain, Hitherto I have recorded in detail the events of my insignificant existence: to the first ten years of my life I have given almost as many chapters. But this is not to be a regular autobiography: I am only bound to invoke Memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest; therefore I now pass a space of eight years almost in silence: a few lines only are necessary to keep up the links of connection. (99) Readers do not usually stop here and say: Wait a minute, Jane, what happened in those eight years you’re skipping over? We trust the teller to supply only the details from the past that seem necessary for us to understand her. But some first-​person narrators are harder to interpret. Lucy Snowe, for example, the evasive narrator of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, refuses to tell the reader about her childhood, yet we sense that something traumatic occurred that deeply affected Lucy’s sense of herself–​–​we do not even learn her name until the second chapter. Lucy’s silences and memory lapses are conspicuous. Is Lucy a controlling, manipulative narrator who withholds information from the reader? Or is she engaged in a project of self-​knowing that requires her to tread carefully on repressed memories or forbidden desires? Dickens’s Esther Summerson, in Bleak House, has also puzzled readers. John O. Jordan has observed that there “are things about her past that Esther knows but does

118  The Storytellers not understand; there are things she is unaware that she knows and that she is therefore incapable of telling; and there are things that she knows but does not want to know” (5). Does she resist knowing the meaning of painful events in her past, or is the writing of her autobiography a way of finding the meaning in those events? To Victorian readers, and to readers now, fictional autobiographies were not “fake” autobiographies or lightly fictionalized versions of the author’s life. Instead, says Pennington, they were understood as “explicitly fictional texts that explored the identities of imaginary characters” (41). They were stories about self-​making. No subject could be more interesting to nineteenth-​ century readers. For probably the first time in western history, people were beginning to think of their lives as uniquely unfolding stories. They did not have to stay in the village where they were born or follow the profession of their parents and grandparents. They could actively shape who they wanted to be. “For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world—​the difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past?” asked John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women (1869). It is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable. (16) In On Liberty, Mill advocated “different experiments in living” (84). First-​ person narratives offered Victorian readers an important space to reflect on these life experiments, to think about how we become who we are, to ponder the role of chance in our lives, choices made or not made, thresholds crossed or turning points on the road. “That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me,” says Pip in Great Expectations. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day. (72) Spotlight I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever. I always knew that. I can remember, when I was a very little girl indeed, I used to say to my doll when we were alone together, “Now, Dolly, I am not clever, you know very well, and you

The Storytellers  119 must be patient with me, like a dear!” And so she used to sit propped up in a great arm-​chair, with her beautiful complexion and rosy lips, staring at me—​or not so much at me, I think, as at nothing—​while I busily stitched away and told her every one of my secrets. (17) This voice must have disoriented readers in March 1852 when they turned to the third chapter of the first monthly number of Dickens’s Bleak House. What has happened, they must have wondered, to the aloof third-​person observer who dominated the first two chapters, who intoned about the implacable November weather and the mud and the mire of the London streets and the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery? Dickens’s strategy in Bleak House–​ –​ the braiding together of two narrators and two tenses–​–​was audaciously experimental. As John Mullan explains in The Artful Dickens, “there had been nothing like it in the English novel before” (73). Even the compositors working for the printers were sometimes confused. In Bleak House, thirty-​four of the sixty-​seven chapters are in the voice of an omniscient narrator, told in the present tense. Thirty-​three chapters are in the first-​person past tense from the perspective of the prudent, reserved heroine, Esther Summerson. Each monthly installment included chapters from both points of view, which match up chronologically although some characters, Mr. Tulkinghorn and Esther, for example, are never allowed to cross over into what Mullan calls the opposite “time zone.” It is not at all unusual today for novelists to use the present tense, but it was much less common in the nineteenth century (though Dickens used it as early as Dombey and Son). Dickens was able to achieve a particular effect by exploiting this technique. In the present tense, something is happening now–​–​there is no space for hindsight or interpretation. The effect is that the reader experiences the world of the novel as something unexplained, uncomprehended. Mullan writes, “The present tense of the third-​ person narrative in Bleak House makes that narrator into an amazed or amused or appalled witness to what is taking place in front of him” (77). This is an interesting insight because one complaint about Victorian omniscience is that it is not bewildered enough: there can be none of James’s “intensity of illusion” if the author is constantly butting in and reminding the reader of his unnatural wisdom. Bleak House, on the other hand, exudes bewilderment. It is impossible to do justice to Dickens’s management of tone and atmosphere in this great Victorian novel. What kind of voice do you hear in this snippet? Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too long by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the

120  The Storytellers iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-​ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to every passer-​by, “Look here!” (137) To some readers, Dickens’s rhetoric in some parts of Bleak House evokes Old Testament-​style denunciation, in the manner of Thomas Carlyle. Following Mullan’s lead, though, it’s possible to hear tired amazement or jadedness in sentences such as these, moral shock shaded with weariness. Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day. (572) Dickens’s third-​person present tense narrator shifts the register from all-​ knowingness to something like confusion. We are miles away from George Eliot’s gracious circumspection: Dickens’s narrator does not intervene in events to offer the reader philosophical explanations. There is little in the way of consolation. This is how it is, he seems to say, pointing down at the dirty city and its ludicrous inhabitants (“Look here!”) with some of the detachment and scorn of the last and most fearful spirit in A Christmas Carol (1843). The disembodied narrative voice in these chapters of Bleak House can do nothing but bear witness to a soiled world spinning madly on, without rhyme or reason. Notes 1 The scholarly journal Style devoted an issue to debates about the implied author. See Style, vol. 45, no. 1 (Spring 2011). Also see Booth, “Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?” 2 J. Hillis Miller’s The Form of Victorian Fiction still offers a concise and insightful theory of narrative intersubjectivity in the Victorian novel. 3 James wrote, in 1905, “Jane Austen, with all her light felicity, leaves us hardly more curious of her process, or of the experience in her that fed it, than the brown thrush who tells his story from the garden bough.” “The Lesson of Balzac,” The Atlantic (August 1905), p. 167. 4 See Fisher, “Image versus Text in the Illustrated Novels of William Makepeace Thackeray.” 5 In Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel, Elaine Freedgood discusses the struggles of mid-​twentieth-​century critics “to find a form for Victorian fiction that tries to move beyond but cannot quite free itself of the heritage of dramatic theory.” Van Ghent’s opinions feature prominently. See Freedgood, pp. 1–​33. 6 See www.bbc.com/​cult​ure/​arti​cle/​20151​204-​the-​100-​great​est-​brit​ish-​nov​els. I also like the scholar Michael Gorra’s succinct explanation, “Why Middlemarch is the

The Storytellers  121 Greatest British Novel,” BBC Culture, 7 December 2015. www.bbc.com/​cult​ure/​ arti​cle/​20151​204-​why-​midd​lema​rch-​is-​the-​great​est-​brit​ish-​novel 7 Trollope’s last novel, The Fixed Period (1882), is a dystopian fantasy set in the distant year 1980, and the only novel in which he used a first-​person narrator.

Works Cited Ablow, Rachel. “Addressing the Reader: The Autobiographical Voice.” The Nineteenth Century Novel, edited by John Kucich and Jenny Bourne Taylor, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 3, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 274–​88. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Penguin, 2008. Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” The Victorian Novel, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 2004, pp. 1–​46. Booth, Wayne. “Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?” A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz, Wiley-​Blackwell, 2005, pp. 75–​88. —​—​—​. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 1961. University of Chicago Press, 1983. Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 1847. Penguin, 1996. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Penguin, 2006. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Penguin, 1995. Collins, Philip, ed. Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage. Barnes and Noble, 1971. Collins, Wilkie. Basil. 1852. Oxford University Press, 1990. —​—​—​. The Moonstone. 1868. Penguin, 1998. —​—​—​. The Woman in White. 1854. Penguin, 2003. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. W. W. Norton, 1977. —​—​—​. Great Expectations. 1861. Penguin, 1996. —​—​—​. Hard Times. 1854. W. W. Norton, 2017. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1872. W. W. Norton, 2000. —​—​—​. The George Eliot Letters. Edited by Gordon Haight, vol. 5, Yale University Press, 1955. Fisher, Judith. “Image versus Text in the Illustrated Novels of William Makepeace Thackeray.” Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, edited by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 60–​87. Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. James R. Osgood & Company, 1875. Accessed at Project Gutenberg. Freedgood, Elaine. Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Princeton University Press, 2019. Haight, Gordon, ed. A Century of George Eliot Criticism. Houghton Mifflin, 1965. James, Henry. “Anthony Trollope.” 1883. The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Roger Gard, Penguin, 1987, pp. 174–​80. —​—​—​. “The Lesson of Balzac.” The Atlantic (August 1905), pp. 167–​80. Accessed at https://​cdn.thea​tlan​tic.com/​media/​archi​ves/​1905/​08/​96-​2/​129636​017.pdf Jordan, John O. Supposing Bleak House. University of Virginia Press, 2011. Kingsley, Charles. Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography. 1850. J. M. Dent & Sons, 1928. Lodge, David. “Dickens Our Contemporary.” Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 113–​34.

122  The Storytellers Mill, John Stuart. “On Liberty.” Mill, edited by Alan Ryan, W. W. Norton, 1997, pp. 41–​131. —​—​—​. The Subjection of Women. 1869. Routledge, 2001. Miller, J. Hillis. The Form of Victorian Fiction. University of Notre Dame Press, 1969. Mullan, John. The Artful Dickens. Bloomsbury, 2021. Murdoch, Iris. “Existentialists and Mystics.” 1970. Existentialists and Mystics. Edited by Peter Conradi, Penguin, 1997, pp. 221–​34. Page, Norman, editor. Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1995. Pennington, Heidi L. Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography. University of Missouri Press, 2018. Smalley, Donald, editor. Trollope: The Critical Heritage. Routledge, 1969. Thackeray, William Makepeace. The History of Pendennis. 1850. Penguin, 1986. —​—​—​. Vanity Fair. 1848. Penguin, 2001. Trollope, Anthony. Can You Forgive Her? 1865. Oxford University Press, 1982. —​—​—​. He Knew He Was Right. 1869. Penguin, 1994. —​—​—​. The Duke’s Children. 1880. Oxford University Press, 1977. Valint, Alexandra. Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel. The Ohio State University Press, 2021. Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. 1953. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Karen Raith at Routledge for her invitation to offer a book on reading Victorian novels and for allowing me to go my own way. It would have been impossible to have even begun without the assistance of the speedy staff at Carrier Library at James Madison University. I also appreciate the help and encouragement of my colleagues in the English Department. Love and gratitude to Chuck, my stay and support in many more ways than he can know. Wordsworth expressed the hope that “what we have loved, /​Others will love, and we will teach them how.” We will have tried, anyway. This book is dedicated to my students, who have ventured to love.

Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 120n3 refers to note 3 on page 120. Altick, Richard D. 19, 22–​4 Austen, Jane 87, 104, 120n3 Barthes, Roland 61 Bloom, Harold 108–​9 Booth, Wayne 100–​2 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 19–​21; Lady Audley’s Secret 85, 86 Brontë, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 87–​9, 113 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre 25, 34, 46, 60, 92–​3, 115–​17; Villette 60, 117 Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights 94–​6, 113 Brooks, Peter 35, 36, 40 Carlyle, Thomas: Sartor Resartus 83, 86 Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland 86 circulating libraries 17–​20, 22–​3 coincidence 33–​4, 44 Collins, Wilkie 37–​8, 51n6; Basil 113–​14; The Moonstone 50–​1, 114; The Woman in White 14, 25–​6, 115 common reader 21, 23–​4 Darwin, Charles 42–​4, 84–​5 democracy 21–​2, 48, 83, 86–​7 Dickens, Charles 10, 12–​14, 79–​80, 102; Bleak House 10–​11, 13, 57, 117–​20; David Copperfield 11–​12, 78, 80; Dombey and Son 17, 23–​7; Great Expectations 34, 60, 117, 118; Hard Times 68–​9, 101; Little Dorrit 64, 68, 113; The Mystery of Edwin Drood 44, 52n11, 80; Our Mutual

Friend 69–​71; The Pickwick Papers 15–​17 Disraeli, Benjamin: Sybil 61–​2 Eliot, George: Adam Bede 40, 42–​3, 56; Daniel Deronda 91; Middlemarch 60, 109–​12; The Mill on the Floss 10, 39, 42, 45–​6, 84–​5 fictional autobiography 115–​18 Forster, E. M. 33–​4, 35, 39, 40, 44, 80 Freedgood, Elaine 4, 120n5, 71–​3 Frith, William Powell 58 Gaskell, Elizabeth: Mary Barton 71–​3; North and South 13–​14, 27–​8 genealogical imperative 43 Gissing, George 63; The Odd Women 89–​90 Gombrich, E. H. 64–​5 Great Exhibition 58 Hardy, Thomas 18, 44–​5, 63, 66–​7, 74 implied author 100–​1 impressionism 59, 60, 67 industrial capitalism 14, 48, 57, 73, 82 James, Henry 10, 39, 46, 55–​6, 65, 74n2, 106, 115 Levine, George: Darwin and the Novelists 42–​4 Lewes, G. H. 10, 69, 79

Index  125 marriage plot 87 Meredith, George 33–​4 Miller, J. Hillis 4, 56, 102–​3 Mill, John Stuart 35–​6, 83, 118 modernism 36, 55, 80, 85, 94 Moore, George 18; Esther Waters 62–​3 multiple narrators 50–​1, 112–​15 multi-​plot novel 43, 46–​9

realism 2, 4, 47, 54, 55–​7, 59–​61, 80, 112 Ruskin, John 59

Nabokov, Vladimir 5–​6, 68 neo-​Victorian novels 4, 92, 98n4

Talbot, William Henry Fox 59–​60 Thackeray, William Makepeace 10, 24, 96, 103; Vanity Fair 107–​9 triple-​deckers 17–​18 Trollope, Anthony 13, 14, 17, 21, 34, 37–​9, 46, 51n6, 65–​6, 91, 96–​8, 104–​6, 113

Oliphant, Margaret: Miss Marjoribanks 80–​2 omniscient narrator 100–​4, 107–​9, 112, 119 panorama 57, 69, 109 penny dreadfuls 18–​19 photography 59–​60 psychology 82, 86–​7, 114 race 3, 83 Reade, Charles 32

Scott, Sir Walter 15 sensation novels 19–​20 Stevenson, Robert Louis 46, 65, 74n2, 113 suspense 13–​14, 19, 35–​6, 39, 48

undisciplining Victorian studies 3 women readers 17, 87–​8, 90 Woolf, Virginia 36, 78, 80, 82, 96 working-​class readers 18–​19 Yonge, Charlotte 32–​3