The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts 9781474408929

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The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts

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The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts

Edited by Josephine M. Guy

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Josephine M. Guy, 2018 © the chapters their several authors, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0891 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0892 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0893 6 (epub) The right of Josephine M. Guy to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

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Contents

List of Figures and Plates Acknowledgements Introduction Josephine M. Guy

vii x 1

I. Concepts 1. Decadence and Institutions of Modernism in the American Literary Field of the 1910s and 1920s Kirsten MacLeod

25

2. The Matter of Form: Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Poetry and the Periodical Press Alison Chapman

46

3. Curious Intricacies: Some Versions of City Writing at the Fin de Siècle Nick Freeman

70

4. Gothic Aesthetics Andrew Smith

90

5. Catholicism and the Fin de Siècle Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

106

6. Secularism and Secularisation at the Fin de Siècle Sara Lyons

124

7. The Claims of Kinship: Humanitarian Ideals at the Century’s End John Stokes

146

8. Information in the 1890s: Technological, Journalistic, Imperial, Occult Richard Menke

162

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II. Places 9. Fin-de-Siècle Scotland Caroline McCracken-Flesher 10. The Irish Fin de Siècle Anne Markey 11. Providing an Ideal Home: Paternalism and Persuasion at Bournville 1895–1914 Margaret Ponsonby

181 196

215

12. Theatre in the Provinces at the Fin de Siècle: Beyond Outcast London Jo Robinson

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13. ‘Truth About Russia’: Russia in Britain at the Fin de Siècle Anna Vaninskaya

244

14. Aestheticism in Italy: A New Sense of Place Stefano Evangelista

263

III. Identities: Female 15. The 1890s Woman Jad Adams

283

16. When a Bestselling Author and a West End Actress Made a Spiritualist Performance: Collaboration, Networks and Theatre at the Fin de Siècle Catherine Hindson

301

17. Intergenerational Collaboration and Conflict: Women’s Periodicals at the Fin de Siècle Alexis Easley

321

18. Lily Montagu and Liberal Judaism Richa Dwor 19. American Nervousness: Motherhood and ‘The Mental Activity of Women’ in the Era of Sexual Anarchy Emily Coit

345

361

IV. Identities: Male 20. German and British Sexual Sciences Across Disciplines at the Fin de Siècle: ‘Homosexuals’, ‘Inverts’ and ‘Uranians’ Ina Linge

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21. The Anglo-African Adventure Novel in the 1890s Gerald Monsman

401

22. The Fin-de-Siècle Detective: ‘But My Job Don’t End There’ Caroline Reitz

425

List of Contributors Index

440 445

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Figures and Plates

Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 16.1 16.2. 16.3

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Beatrice Crane, ‘Legend of the Blush Roses’, Woman’s World, February 1888: 177. Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘1865–1866’, Good Words, 1 March 1868: 144. Christina Rossetti, ‘A Christmas Carol’, Atalanta, December 1887: 154. Christina Rossetti, ‘An Echo from Willowwood’, Magazine of Art, January 1890: 385. Lord Houghton, ‘Easter: In Florence’, Magazine of Art, January 1890: 276. Lord Houghton, ‘Easter: In Florence’, Magazine of Art, January 1890: 277. ‘Blue Jay’ (Lady Jane Maria Strachey), ‘The Christmas Fleet’, Atalanta, December 1888: 218. ‘Blue Jay’ (Lady Jane Maria Strachey), ‘The Christmas Fleet’, Atalanta, December 1888: 219. Selwyn Image, ‘A Christmas Carol’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January 1886: 3. Selwyn Image, ‘A Christmas Carol’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January 1886: 4. Antony Burgess, ‘The Lady of the Rains’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January 1886: 3. George Egerton, Keynotes (1894); title page. Photograph of Ella Hepworth Dixon when she was writing My Flirtations. Leila Macdonald, The Love of the Poor, 2 April 1896; first page. Ménie Muriel Dowie as A Girl in the Karpathians. ‘Advertisement’, Musical Times, 1 November 1917: 483. The trefoil. ‘Rheus and his Household Offering Prayers to Isis’ in False Gods, Playgoer and Society Illustrated, 1 October 1909: 13. Courtesy of University of Bristol Theatre Collection.

47 50 51 52 54 55 56 57 61 62 63 285 288 295 296 306 309

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viii

figures and plates

17.1

Matt Morgan, ‘“The girl of the period!” Or, Painted by a Prurient Prude’, Tomahawk, 4 April 1868: 139. 17.2 Cover, Sketch, 19 August 1908: 812. 17.3 ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives: Miss Charlotte Yonge’, Strand Magazine, November 1891: 479. 17.4 ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives: Miss Mary Anderson’, Strand Magazine, December 1891: 601. 17.5 Cover, Shafts, 3 November 1892. © British Library. 17.6 Advertisement for Vilmar’s Cream Company, Suffragette, 7 February 1913: 267. © British Library. 17.7 Advertisement for Peter Robinson’s clothing store, Suffragette, 22 November 1912: 92. © British Library. 17.8 Advertisement for John Harries clothing store, Suffragette, 8 November 1912: 50. © British Library. 17.9 Manuscript page of ‘A Deserted Village’ and portrait of Violet Fane, Lady’s Realm, October 1897: 628–9. 17.10 M. Bowley, title illustration for ‘The New Woman and the Old’, Lady’s Realm, August 1898: 466–70. 17.11 Illustration for ‘Love and the Young Generation Open the Door’, Lady’s Realm, May 1898: 15.

325 327

328 329 330 333 333 334 336 337 339

Plates The plate section can be found between pages 214 and 215. Plate 1

Plate 2

Plate 3

Plate 4

Plate 5

Plate 6 Plate 7

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A selection of ten Modern Library books by decadents and new decadents dating between 1917 and 1934 (left); a selection of Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books (right). In possession of author. Photograph by author. An illustration by Majeska (Henriette Stern) for Pierre Loüys (1928), Psyche, New York: Covici, Friede. In possession of author. Photograph by author. Reprinted by permission of Joan C. Covici and Joan Vollrath. A variety of ‘yellow books’ of the 1920s as issued by the Bonis, Boni and Liveright, Liveright, and Knopf. In possession of author. Photograph by author. A Wallace Smith illustration for Ben Hecht (1922), Fantazius Mallare, Chicago: Covici-McGee. In possession of author. Photograph by author. Knopf books in decorated boards by Carl Van Vechten (top left, bottom left, right) and Thomas Beer (centre). In possession of author. Photograph by author. Decadent and ‘decadent modernist’ titles as issued in paperback form in the 1940s. In possession of author. Photograph by author. Bournville cottage window. Reproduced by permission of Bournville Village Trust.

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figures and plates Plate 8 Plate 9 Plate 10

Plate 11

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ix

Bournville cottage fireplace. Reproduced by permission of Bournville Village Trust. Bournville cottage bedroom. Reproduced by permission of Bournville Village Trust. Playbill, A Doll’s House and Candida, Theatre Royal Nottingham, 13 September 1897. Image courtesy of Theatre Royal and Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham. ‘Miss Maud Hoffman’, in L. Boyle (ed.) (1900), Celebrities of the Stage, London: George Newnes.

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Acknowledgements

T

his volume of essays was conceived, commissioned and completed during a fouryear term as Head of School; I would like to thank all my colleagues in the School of English at the University of Nottingham for their support and cooperation during what proved to be a demanding administrative role, and for making it possible for me to complete this project (and others). Acknowledgement is also due to Winnie, for keeping all of us cheerful and reminding me daily of the importance of living ‘for the moment’. Finally I would like to thank Fiona Sewell, for her careful work in preparing the volume for publication, Emma Caddy for compiling the index, and Jackie Jones and Adela Rauchova at EUP for their support throughout this project. Josephine M. Guy

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Introduction Josephine M. Guy

A

lthough the painting that forms the cover to this volume – The Brontolonis (1890), by the Hungarian artist Bertalan Karlovsky (1858–1938) – may be new to some readers, its subject matter is easily enough read, in that it encapsulates many of the clichés by which we have come to understand the cultural moment referred to as the fin de siècle. The artful composition of the subjects’ languid postures, with their stylish artistic dress and studiously meditative gaze, averted both from the viewer and from each other, speaks to a familiar fin-de-siècle self-absorption, as well as to a sense of luxury, sophistication, artificiality, ennui (emphasised by the man’s backwards-leaning contemplation of his pocket-watch) and dissipation (both are in need of support from the sturdy chair), while also marking a realignment in traditional gender and familial relations. The child in this family portrait is marginalised to a blurred, off-centre picture on the wall, one taking its place alongside the cluttered ornamentation – Eastern parasol, abstract painting, musical instruments – of the fashionably cosmopolitan ‘aesthetic’ interior, complete with richly patterned walls and, in the clothing of the Brontolonis, a decorative, Whistleresque composition of bright golds and greens.1 The Brontolonis themselves may be forgotten to history, but as 1890s ‘types’ they, and their setting, are immediately recognisable. As such, they provide a useful point of departure for the chapters in this volume, the main purpose of which is to complicate, and in some cases to challenge, these somewhat over-familiar fin-de-siècle themes and tropes. In the process, this volume also aims to pose questions about the use of this period designation, querying the singularity of the cultural transformation which the fin de siècle is commonly taken to have marked, and which is captured in its designation in popular mythology as the moment that ‘shocked the Victorian establishment by challenging traditional values, foregrounding sensuality and promoting artistic, sexual and political experimentation’ (Burdette 2017).2 This conventional understanding of the fin de siècle, as a time of remarkable, and remarkably influential, artistic provocation is generally traced back to Holbrook Jackson’s pioneering study, The Eighteen Nineties (1913), which argued that the last decade of the nineteenth century possessed qualities that were distinct from any previous century’s end. Key to this sense of difference, and implicit in the etymology of the term, is the way in which the fin de siècle was held to designate a dramatic, if paradoxical, moment in a long and complex history of nineteenth-century Anglo-French cultural relations. By the 1890s, France, and more particularly Paris, had come to serve two quite contradictory purposes in British culture. It was seen either as a haven of artistic sophistication and birthplace of the avant-garde to which British writers fled (whether in practice or in the imagination) in order to escape the stultifying rigidities

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of English metropolitan life; or, in the hysterical but populist form of Francophobia found in Marie Corelli’s Wormwood (1890), as a site of iniquity – both embodiment and source of the degenerative corruption that was viewed as threatening what was then defined as ‘noble’ Englishness. The 1890s literary and artistic movements most closely associated with this British fin de siècle, which was, as I have noted, in practice largely English and London-based – Aestheticism, Symbolism, Naturalism and Impressionism – were all seen as having their origins in France, and for many contemporary commentators it was precisely this distinctive metropolitan and Franco-centric turn in British cultural life, occurring at a point in the century when arguments advocating English nationalism were at their strongest, which helped make the 1890s unique. In this respect, it is hardly an accident that Karlovszky himself, although judged by history to be an academician rather than a member of the avant-garde (he held the post of professor at the Hungarian University of the Fine Arts), nonetheless spent a significant period of his early adult life in Paris, studying at the studio of his more famous compatriot, Mihály Munkácsy. Jackson’s thesis about the uniqueness of the 1890s was sufficiently persuasive to establish that decade as a discrete object of study, while also helping define the meaning of the term ‘fin de siècle’ for subsequent generations of literary historians. For those later historians, and taking their cue from Jackson, the nineteenth-century fin de siècle came to be viewed as marking an important moment of transition – albeit one with flexible boundaries, stretching backward to the 1880s and forward to the early 1900s – between two larger periods: ‘Victorianism’ and ‘modernism’. More significantly, it was a transition that with hindsight possessed a singular characteristic. It seemed to contain within it an apocalyptic sense of cultural decay, or (to use a term then current) a process of ‘degeneration’, one for which a ready analogue was found in what the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon had referred to as the ‘decline and fall’ of the Roman Empire; and it also expressed an awareness of the approach of a new age – ‘newness’ or ‘modernity’ thus also became watchwords of the decade. After Jackson’s work, fin-de-siècle culture was seen to embody a paradox or duality: it rejected those ‘high’ Victorian values of work, duty, the family, tradition, progress and social responsibility, for which it had been labelled ‘decadent’ or ‘degenerate’; simultaneously, that same rejection of Victorian values was held to anticipate, albeit only imprecisely, the more thoroughgoing revolution in form and taste associated with early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, and particularly with modernism. In this respect, a key aspect of that fin-de-siècle disparaging of Victorianism was what was seen as a rejection of Victorian popular culture, and the forms of mass media, particularly mass publishing, that had made it possible. Fin-de-siècle authors, for example, were typically defined as writing for the specialist or coterie houses which had begun to multiply in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and which set themselves ideologically (if not always practically or economically) in opposition to what were seen as the debased values of the commodified bourgeois marketplace. This in turn helps explain why it was the poet, or more precisely, the figure of the ‘poète maudit’ of the ‘tragic generation’ later identified by W. B. Yeats, who was held to be in the vanguard of this change in sensibility. It was one for which failure, poverty and ultimately death – when in the service of art – were to be valued more highly than commercial or critical success, as defined by what was then seen as a normative (or ‘anti-decadent’) literary and artistic establishment.

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A further element in this opposition to Victorian taste was an embracing of the contemporary, which at the time meant a celebration of the urban, the artificial and nightlife; a concern with spectatorship rather than action; an inward focus on the nature of experience and its inevitable transience; and finally, a substitution of aesthetic for moral values in which the categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were reduced to mere ‘images’ (as Arthur Symons phrased matters in the title of his 1899 volume of poetry), and a consciousness of oblivion inspired not regret but rather, in Theodore Wratislaw’s ‘Trance’, ecstatic consolation: ‘might we swooning deathwards blend / Our spirits in one perfect kiss!’ Although often heavily dependent on tradition (whether literary, liturgical or classical), fin-de-siècle writers and artists were nonetheless viewed as responding to, and helping to define, what constituted modernity (at least as it was later understood by modernists). In attempting to separate art and literature from any sense of the political and the social, they could certainly appear self-indulgent and nihilistic; yet it was through their very consciousness of limits – that apocalyptic ‘sense of an ending’ – that they provided the possibility for new beginnings. Thus the social and cultural annihilation feared by contemporary commentators could be revalued as representing virtually its opposite: for the modern cultural historian, the fin de siècle has come to designate a moment of exceptional vitality and creativity, in which literary and artistic experimentation was an element of what Stephen Arata has termed ‘a time of extraordinarily rich political ferment’ (1999: 62). Far from marking a cultural dead end, from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, the 1890s has been more typically viewed as the origin of major new ways of thinking and of new cultural forms. Another commonly identified characteristic of the nineteenth-century fin de siècle was the way in which a so-called fin-de-siècle sensibility pervaded many aspects of culture, manifesting itself not simply in literature and art, but also in music and interior decoration, as well as in elements of sexual behaviour, gender identification and political life, including imperialist discourses and concerns about the threats posed by a failure fully to contain and anglicise colonised peoples. It was precisely the perceived interconnections between different areas of cultural activity, and a tendency to interpret signs of so-called ‘degeneration’ (whether identified with transgressive literary, artistic, political or sexual practices) as manifestations of a single overarching pathology, which led Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892) to be viewed as one of the defining fin-de-siècle texts. Entartung helped to set the terms by which the fin de siècle was understood, while also, in the sweeping claims of its methodology, articulating what has proved to be a particularly compelling, because expansive, type of cultural explanation. Thus while later critical studies have vigorously contested Nordau’s evaluation of the phenomena he identified, as well as exposing the prejudices underpinning his account – for example, historians of sexuality, such as Ed Cohen (1993) and Jeffrey Weeks (1977), have seen in 1890s attitudes towards same-sex desire shifts of definition that presaged later, more enlightened or ‘modern’ understandings of sexual identity – Nordau’s desire to understand this moment in history holistically, in the sense of seeing it as marking some fundamental change in a zeitgeist, has nonetheless persisted. Thus studies in the 1980s and 1990s found evidence in a wide range of 1890s texts and images of deep anxieties about sexual and racial identities (sexual and racial ‘others’ typically being marginalised as ‘degenerates’), as well as worries about a perceived decline in literary and artistic taste. Elaine Showalter (1990), for example, influentially

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argued for a direct link between a contemporary medical iconography of so-called ‘degenerative’ diseases, a crisis in gender identity, and an interest in literary genres that centred on fantasy, such as gothic and adventure fiction. Likewise Patrick Brantlinger (1988) related the popularity of these same genres to the way in which their focus on regression and invasion allowed the articulation of apprehensions about the whole imperial project, at the precise moment when the British Empire was under visible strain, both economic and military. Other critics focused more broadly on the relationship between fantasy and monstrosity – for example, the ability of some literary genres to express anxieties about atavism that ran counter to a general understanding of the evolutionary nature of human development as fundamentally progressive, whether applied to biological, social or cultural spheres. Even Linda Dowling (1979; 1986), who had proposed that the origins of fin-de-siècle decadence lay in attitudes towards language (and specifically German philology), conceded the broader cultural meaning of the term when she linked, through their joint vision of social apocalypse, the transgressive figure of the new woman and the decadent. To date, most modern scholarship on the fin de siècle has continued to work more or less within the broad assumptions that inform this common usage: with the notion that the fin de siècle marks a distinct kind and consciousness of cultural change, exhibited in the range of activities and areas of knowledge involved; in the depth of engagement (enabled through developments in transport and technology) with the ideas and cultures of other countries (especially that of France); and in an unusual sense of duality, manifest in paradoxical attitudes towards endings and beginnings, as well as in ideas about selfhood (most famously seen in the doppelgänger motif). Moreover, the general trajectory of this scholarly tradition, in keeping with the initial groundwork laid down by Nordau, has been to seek to improve understanding by ever-widening critical perspectives, whether to encompass a larger time frame (stretching the boundaries of the period further backwards to the 1870s and further forwards to the 1920s); to embrace a greater diversity of writers, artists, disciplines, practices and technologies; or to extend the geographical reach of the fin de siècle from Britain, France and Britain’s colonies, to a consideration, as Michael Saler (2015) has suggested in a recent essay collection, of the ‘world’. Saler explains this interest in the global meaning of the fin de siècle by reference to what he terms a ‘broader turn’ in academic scholarship in general, one which involves a concern with ‘transnational networks’, and for which (what he sees as) the ‘inherently’ global nature of the fin de siècle makes for an especially fitting subject (5).3 To compare the ambition of Saler’s wide-reaching volume to the ground covered in Marshall’s (2007)4 cogent introduction to the period, or to that in earlier essay collections, such as those of Stokes (1992) and Pykett (1996), or to anthologies of contemporary source documents, such as the volumes put together by Ledger and Luckhurst (2000) or by Schaffer (2006), is to appreciate the depth of curiosity which the fin de siècle stimulates, as well as the extent of the cultural territory it is now assumed to encompass.5 More significantly, perhaps, it is also to witness the replaying of a research agenda that is familiar from attempts to mark out other moments of significance in cultural history, notably the transition identified with another allegedly ‘revolutionary’ period – that between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture. Comparisons of accounts of the transition from romanticism to Victorianism, on the one hand, and from Victorianism, via the fin de siècle, to modernism, on the other, show that in both cases sustained critical attention has led to a

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broadening out of the alleged ‘turning-point’ moment, both in terms of time (as origins and end points are stretched)6 and in terms of membership (as more and more types of cultural phenomena are brought into view, whether as precursors, agents or exemplars of what is seen, at the time, to represent ‘the new’). There has also been an odd blurring of explanation, in that characteristics associated with the alleged novelty of the late nineteenth-century moment – such as consumerism and the birth of a celebrity culture – have been reinterpreted (or perhaps hijacked) by historians of the eighteenth century, as having their origins in, and therefore perhaps more appropriately defining, that earlier turning point (see, for example, Mole 2007). This critical manoeuvring is probably explained by the continued influence of the concept of avant-gardism on literary and cultural history, and the high value given to novelty as opposed to continuity or repetition; after all, identifying literary and artistic phenomena with whatever is viewed as being in a vanguard comes with a ready-made validation. However, it also suggests some potential drawbacks to such an expansive or ‘inclusivist’ impetus, and these are worth rehearsing briefly, as they help to situate the ambitions of the present volume, and the nature of its contribution to current scholarship. Most obviously, the larger and more diverse a moment of transition is held to be, the less compelling or exclusive are the explanatory concepts associated with it, particularly with regard to fine-grained accounts of specific literary, artistic and cultural phenomena. Put another way, and as Saler himself acknowledges, with an enlargement of perspective, the relationship between what he terms ‘global linkages’ and ‘local problematics’7 – or more abstractly, perhaps, between type and token – becomes vexed: attempted generalisations across multifarious phenomena and cultures, which may hold to different concepts of time, calendar and periodisation, can seem forced and reductive, ironing out both specificity and complexity; likewise (and this is perhaps more usual), acknowledgments of ‘difference’ may be too easily explained (away) through a clichéd vocabulary of ‘confrontation’ or ‘flux’ which in turn, and in a vicious circularity, become the watchwords by which a given period or moment then comes to be characterised. Neither of these caveats is intended to undermine the importance of taking on board a global perspective (however ‘global’ – itself a contentious term – may be defined); or to detract from the valuable insights that can arise from considering the new kinds of evidence which Saler’s volume brings to light. I rather raise them in order to distinguish between the kind of re-visioning of the fin de siècle aimed at in The Fin de Siècle World and that which is proposed in the current volume. In this respect, a key feature of The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts is that its scope has been consciously restricted to exploring the meaning of the fin de siècle primarily for literary, artistic and theatrical production, so that when concepts such as, for example, ‘secularism’ or ‘humanism’ are addressed, it is in terms of how they were articulated by specific writers, artists or performers. By the same token, when attention is given to practices such as interior decoration it is because these activities came to be viewed at the fin de siècle as aesthetically important, in the sense that artistic status was claimed for them. Likewise, the exploration, in this volume, of the novelty of the ideas of selfhood, sexuality and gender associated with the fin de siècle concentrates on how concepts of masculinity or femininity were negotiated through specific cultural practices – through engagements with specific forms of creative activity, such as writing for the stage or periodical journalism. Attention is not to debates about gender and identity per se, nor is it to the importance, for example,

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of the development at this time of psychology as a discipline, or of new, physiologically grounded understandings of mental phenomena. Rather, it is to how, as particular kinds of cultural media, literary, artistic and performance practices may have enabled such identities to be explored, experienced and expressed. One reason for this narrowing of focus (in comparison to Saler’s volume) has been to try to gain a stronger purchase on the usefulness, for explaining specific literary, artistic or dramatic works, of those key elements of fin-de-siècle mythology which I have outlined above, including the association of cultural production at this time with a transgressive aesthetic, with elite or coterie culture, with metropolitanism, with a form of cosmopolitanism understood primarily in terms of relationships between English and European culture, and between Britain and empire, especially as regards anxieties provoked by racial or sexual ‘others’. A further reason relates to an interest in exploring the impact on fin-de-siècle scholarship of emergent research themes and paradigms which are distinct from (although in productive dialogue with) the ‘global turn’ identified by Saler. These include, primarily, an attention to regionalism, and an appreciation that British nationalism in the late nineteenth century involved contestations not only between the constituent countries of the British Isles, between Britain and her colonies, and between Britain and various European countries (especially Ireland); but also between regions within Scotland, Wales and England, and which can be seen, for example, in the importance of the idea of ‘the north’ (see, for example, Cockin 2013), or in the sense of civic identity that developed in cities like Manchester and Birmingham in explicit competition with that of London, or to differing ideas of the rural articulated in writing about, say, Suffolk or Shropshire, as opposed to Dorset or Northamptonshire. Expansion of the geography of the fin de siècle beyond the familiar Franco/British axis has tended to neglect this regional dimension, in the sense that the direction of movement has, as noted, tended to be outwards, to a globalism that travels eastwards to embrace countries like India, China and Japan. This volume, by contrast, concentrates on a more contained and local map, exploring what the fin de siècle might have meant in Ireland and Scotland as well as in some of the regions of England. And when the critical gaze is further afield – when it is extended to Russia and Italy – the focus is not so much on what the fin de siècle may have meant in those countries as on the significance for British culture of a particular engagement with, or mediation of, Russian and Italian cultural practices. A further scholarly trend this volume explores is the impact of the new ways of understanding late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture which have emerged from the sub-disciplines of book and theatre history, with their emphasis on studying the specific material forms in which concepts and ideas are embodied, consumed and transmitted, and on taking account of the economic specificities of late nineteenthcentury consumerism. This means, for example, explaining the cultural significance of certain works by looking at evidence of actual numbers of books sold and the cost of their production, as opposed to claims made for their rarity by publishers and writers; or by interrogating the costs, economic and practical, of staging avant-garde theatre. Importantly, this volume does not present attention to print culture or the theatre industry as simply another discrete topic in fin-de-siècle scholarship. It rather emerges as a basic methodological orientation which underwrites the ways in which a wide range of cultural phenomena is addressed, and in a manner which also tends to pull

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in the opposite direction from Saler’s ‘transnationalism’, eschewing generalisations in favour of examining the local and particular. In this respect, a key concern of the present volume has been to explore whether and how attending to micro- rather than macro-cultural issues troubles the grand narratives with which we have become familiar. Thus, rather than aiming for coverage or representativeness – whether of cultural forms, genres, writers or artists – the contributions to this volume concentrate instead on showing how specific details of research relating to particular texts, images or performances might invite us to rethink (or in some cases serve to endorse) current ways of conceptualising the period. And a key conclusion of the chapters taken as a whole is that the concept of the fin de siècle may have relatively little value, as regards characterising a distinct, culturally significant 1890s ‘moment’ or sensibility, in the manner originally theorised by Jackson. This is not because there were no significant, innovative or provocative literary, artistic and theatrical practices occurring at this time; in fact, in relation to this issue, the research in this volume tends to affirm what other scholarship has found – that newness, regeneration and an optimistic looking forwards are as much a feature of this cultural moment as its alleged obsession with finitude and decline. That said, it is nonetheless the case that the diverse forms these practices took, and the varying timelines along which they developed in different geographical locations, as well as the multiplicity of ideas they articulated and of responses they elicited, do not cohere into any simple pattern; nor is there any obvious point of their intersection which might be said to mark a cultural turning point. Rather, many possible intersections can be identified, depending on what is selected, along a continuum that stretches for some sixty-odd years. And so the question which this volume aims to pose (but does not answer) is: what is to be gained by characterising, and thus distinguishing, all, or indeed any, of these ‘moments’ as ‘fin-de-siècle’? The contributions to this volume have been organised into four broad sections. Within these there has been no attempt to provide a balance between different cultural media, whether literary, artistic or theatrical. Rather, contributors have discussed those cultural forms or practices which are pertinent to the particular topic they are investigating, with several referring to texts, images and performances simultaneously. Likewise, there has been no attempt to balance discussion of the canonical with the non-canonical, although many chapters make a virtue of juxtaposing the well-known with the unfamiliar, usually with a view to re-evaluating that relationship. The purpose of Part I is to revisit some concepts familiar from the earliest understandings of the fin de siècle, while also bringing to the fore cultural developments which have been afforded less attention, but which were, nonetheless, of historical significance at this moment. It thus begins with a discussion of the meanings of decadence, undertaken through a close examination of the material history of the print media through which those meanings were circulated and negotiated. This materialist emphasis is continued in the second chapter, which looks at how the permeability of different art forms associated with the fin de siècle – most famously, perhaps, in synaesthesic poetry, or in a taste for highly decorated books – was realised in the context of new ways (materially speaking) of envisaging the publication of poetry. There then follow three chapters examining issues closely identified with the distinctiveness of fin-de-siècle aesthetics: the city, the gothic and Catholicism. In each case, the emphasis is on pinpointing what distinguishes the literary, artistic or dramatic responses to, or

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articulation of, these phenomena at the time. The last three contributions to this section set out some less expected, but linked and complicating, ideas about secularism, humanitarianism and information. Here the stress is (again) on recovering the specific (and novel) understandings of these concepts at the fin de siècle and their links with modernity, with a view to presenting different perspectives on this cultural moment. Part II considers some neglected aspects of the geography of the ‘British’ fin de siècle, focusing first on events in Scotland and Ireland, and then considering examples of cultural developments in two regional British cities – Birmingham and Nottingham – which consciously opposed a London-centric vision of English nationalism. The final two chapters look at the significance of the culture of two countries – Russia and Italy – with which Britain had enjoyed a long and complex history of engagement, but which have been afforded less attention (in comparison, say, to cultural relations between Britain and France or between Britain and Germany) in accounts of the singularity of the period. Parts III and IV focus on what was new about the way concepts of identity – femininity and masculinity – were articulated and expressed at this time. Here attention is given not so much to describing how novel ‘types’ of selfhood, such as the ‘new woman’ or ‘homosexual’, emerged, but rather, and as noted above, to exploring whether and how gender could be renegotiated through specific kinds of literary, artistic and performance practices. Hence Part III begins with an evaluation of the successes and failures (both in life and in art) of some of the ‘new women’ of the 1890s. The chapters that follow provide a series of case studies which explore the extent to which individual women were able to ‘remake’ themselves (as well as the politics underlying that remaking) through working in the theatre or in periodical journalism, or through certain forms of political and religious activism, as well as through writing about motherhood. Part IV is similarly structured, with the first and more general chapter re-examining the origins of some familiar fin-de-siècle concepts of (homo)sexuality, and those which follow focusing on two contemporary models of maleness – the adventure hero and the detective – with a view to re-evaluating their association with ‘anti-decadent’ or reactionary sentiments. Inevitably there are areas of common ground that cut across this sectional arrangement, and which raise further questions. Of these, the most significant, perhaps, is the state of Anglo-American cultural relations at this time. Partly because of improved methods of communication and transport, which made crossing the Atlantic and conversing with America quicker and cheaper, and partly because of the 1891 Chace Act, which for the first time gave copyright protection in America to British writers, the 1890s offered unprecedented opportunities for Anglo-American cultural engagements and transactions. Theatrical impresarios saw opportunities in America to establish performance copyright for plays that did not pass British censorship. Late nineteenthcentury authors co-published in both countries, and British publishing houses saw advantages in setting up a New York office. Artists, performers and writers – Wilde and Whistler are perhaps the most famous examples – crossed the Atlantic, promoting themselves and their works in ways that were nuanced to subtly different types of audiences and contexts, and with an assiduity that gives the lie to Henry James’s caricature of a decadent European sophistication contrasting with a naive American consumerism. America may have provided an important (and in some cases, an enabling) market for British fin-de-siècle cultural goods, but it was one which required effort and discernment to negotiate successfully. Several chapters in this volume make reference

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to, or draw their examples from, American and British culture simultaneously, moving as fluidly between the two countries as the artists, writers and performers of the time. A further and related cross-cutting theme concerns the relationship between popular and elite or coterie culture. The range of authors, works and practices discussed in the chapters that follow suggests that for most modern critics this distinction, so entrenched in early theorisations of the period, no longer holds much force, certainly as a way of characterising those works that might be seen as transgressive, provocative or ‘new’. Contemporary mores could be called into question in all sorts of genres and media, including those that have traditionally been viewed as inimical to the forms of revolt associated with the apocalyptic fin-de-siècle sensibility. This observation in turn suggests that audiences for fin-se-siècle cultural products were in practice more varied, and certainly less easily shocked, than commentators then (and sometimes since) have tended to assume. Part I opens with Kirsten MacLeod’s account of the tensions between what she terms ‘make it new’ modernists and ‘decadent modernists’, which are traced through a detailed account of the institutions of publishing in America and Britain in the early 1900s, with attention being paid to the elaborately decorated books that are so frequently associated with fin-de-siècle culture. MacLeod shows how, at this time, it was the decadents – figures such as Maxwell Bodenheim, Djuna Barnes, Clara Tice, Mina Loy, Wallace Stevens, Charles Demuth, Francis Picabia, Donald Evans, Carl Van Vechten, Joseph Hergesheimer, Thomas Beer, Elinor Wylie and Ben Hecht – who enjoyed the greater successes, in terms of being published in books that were more attractively produced, more collectible and, ultimately, better-selling than those of modernists such as Ezra Pound. These ‘decadent modernists’ also tended to fare better in critical surveys of the period. MacLeod’s chapter shows how decadence, far from signalling imminent cultural apocalypse, and like so many avant-garde movements, quickly became acceptable, with reprints of provocative or risqué 1890s works providing surprisingly commercial prospects for early twentieth-century publishers. That these decadents were later eclipsed by the modernists was the result, MacLeod speculates at the conclusion of her chapter, of the relocation of criticism in the 1930s and 1940s to the academy, and the rise of the paperback revolution. Her chapter is a useful illustration of how extensively material histories can change our conception of a period; the abundance of empirical evidence she provides for what was actually being published, circulated and reviewed at this time provides an illuminating counterpart to the ways in which this cultural moment would later be characterised by those in competition with the decadents to be held the progenitors of modernity. Some of the themes in MacLeod’s chapter are taken up by Alison Chapman, who also sees print culture as a window on new understandings of the period. Chapman’s focus is on poetry published in late nineteenth-century periodicals, and more particularly on the innovative use of print and illustration to build what she terms that ‘coherence or unity of graphic arts’ which is popularly associated with the period, and which, in this instance, helped mark out a distinctive audience. Through close readings of illustrated poems in a wide range of periodicals, including the Woman’s World, The Yellow Book, Good Words, Atalanta, The Magazine of Art, Pageant, The Century Guild Hobby Horse and The Dome, Chapman shows how the politics of 1890s poetry is contingent on its graphic treatment in its print context. What is striking in her account is not only the richness and complexity of the ‘decorative poetics’ she describes, but the fact that even

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relatively commercial publications, like The Dome, which aimed at a general readership, also ‘relied on a graphic design that shared features with rival 1890s magazines’. Here she touches on a theme that is common to several other chapters, and noted above: that the material realities of late nineteenth-century literary, artistic and performance culture belie any simple oppositions between forms and styles associated with popular versus elite culture. The findings of both MacLeod and Chapman blur the distinctions, albeit in different ways, between mainstream and coterie publishing. Nick Freeman’s examination of city writing – and particularly writing about London – surveys a wide range of poetry (by figures such as Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Charlotte Mew, Amy Levy, Rosamond Marriott Watson and Alice Meynell) and prose (by Henry James, George Gissing, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Joyce, Arthur Machen, H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, among others), explaining why the metropolis became such an important subject for writers at the end of the century, as well as how it consistently challenged and eluded perception, except in partial or fragmentary ways. Freeman identifies a variety of contemporary methodologies for capturing the urban environment, giving particular attention to impressionism and symbolism, although he stresses that there was ‘no single, dominant approach to writing about cities’ in this period, and no single or dominant defining urban vision. It was rather a case, Freeman suggests, of writers assembling ‘composite or piecemeal’ images. In showing the interconnections between late Victorian, modernist and Edwardian writers Freeman’s chapter also suggests (as does that of MacLeod) the artificiality of seeing the 1890s as ‘discrete’ or special in relation to the decades which precede and follow it. Andrew Smith’s examination of gothic aesthetics also stresses interconnections, in this instance between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic, the sensation fiction of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fin-de-siècle gothic works and modernism. However, his main concern is to examine what he sees as a distinct, albeit ‘implicit’ (rather than overtly theorised), gothic aesthetic that develops in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and which is characterised by a concern with divided selves, fragmented narratives and science. More specifically, Smith, while acknowledging a relationship with contemporary ideas about degeneration, nonetheless sees the fin-de-siècle gothic aesthetic as distinguished by optimistic narratives about adaptability and the presence of a spiritual or mystical world. Through close readings of works by Stevenson, Machen, Wilde, F. W. H. Myers, Bram Stoker, May Sinclair and Vernon Lee, Smith refutes the idea that the fin-de-siècle gothic is an ‘aesthetic of alienation’, stressing instead a repeated concern with communication and conversation, and with the sharing of ideas, albeit through ghostly, subliminal or mystical means. This interest in the spiritual is taken up in a different way by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, who revisits the role of faith, and specifically of Catholicism, at the fin de siècle – a topic first elaborated in depth by Mario Praz, who (as Stefano Evangelista reminds us in his contribution to this volume, discussed below) was a protégé of Vernon Lee. Burstein’s chapter begins with a brief survey of the historical contexts for French and English Catholic practice at the end of the century, in which she highlights key anxieties and interests of literary fin-de-siècle Catholics on both sides of the channel, including the critique of ‘realism’ and materialism, the paradoxical role of nostalgia in envisioning Catholicism’s future, and what she calls the ‘arts’ of suffering, sacrifice and penance. She goes on to discuss the works of French writers such as

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Léon Bloy, J. K. Huysmans, Paul Claudel, Octave Mirbeau and Emile Zola, comparing them with the work of familiar British 1890s poets, such as Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Lord Alfred Douglas, John Gray, Francis Thompson and Wilde, as well as (and what for many readers will be less well known) ‘recusant’ novelists, such as Frances Taylor and Louise Imogen Guiney, and the pro-secular works of figures such as Ethel Voynich. Like Freeman in his discussion of responses to the city, Burstein highlights the complexity of fin-de-siècle Catholicism as a spiritual and intellectual resource, arguing that it opened up ‘multiple strategies’ for envisioning how society might be purified and renewed, even for secular writers, given a world that seemed ever more threatened by secularism and commercialism. For figures associated with the French Catholic Revival, it promised ‘a hard but ultimately joyous road of expiation for the nation’s sins, undertaken by souls willing to return to the inspiring wells of medieval sainthood’; while for their English equivalents, who were, Burstein argues, rather less interested in vicarious suffering, Catholicism ‘still provided a road back to an organic Englishness, away from the dangers of capitalist individualism and Protestant persecution’. Like Burstein, Sara Lyons begins her chapter with a general examination of secularism at the fin de siècle, exploring both what she terms the ‘declining fortunes’ of ‘secularism’ as an organised movement, as well as the ‘elasticity’, at that time, of the meaning of the term. In the hands of figures such as George Jacob Holyoake, secularism was neither an attack on religion – which, as Lyons (again like Burstein) reminds us, was far from being in decline at this moment – nor did it equate, in any simple way, with a disbelief in God, or the sacred. Rather, Lyons suggests, secularism at the fin de siècle is better understood as a prioritising of ‘this-worldly’ concerns. Lyons goes on to discuss the fiction of Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, showing how novels such as Born in Exile and Jude the Obscure, while infused with the ‘pessimistic rationalism of naturalism’, nonetheless continue to make use of theological motifs. Her chapter concludes with an examination of the poetry of Mathilde Blind, Marriott Watson and Symons – all figures who used the discourses of Aestheticism to ‘contest the conventional equation of secularisation with disenchantment’ and to construct, instead, ‘a language of secular affirmation’. Thus like Smith, Lyons, too, finds in some fin-de-siècle writing not the hopelessness and alienation of popular mythology, but rather, new quasi-religious forms of immanence. The trajectory which John Stokes traces in his chapter is not dissimilar, in that he also identifies an element of visionary zeal – verging, in its attack on contemporary civilisation, on the apocalyptic – in the proselytising of the ‘self-styled’ fin-de-siècle ‘humanitarians’ and their formal organisation, the ‘Humanitarian League’. Stokes shows how in the late nineteenth century ‘humanitarianism’, or behaving ‘humanely’, had come to mean being actively aware of ‘the human in relation to the non-human’, and most specifically, the human in relation to the animal world. He explains how for George Romanes, a follower of Darwin, this meant imputing a form of consciousness and ‘reason’ to animals; while for T. H. Huxley, it meant acknowledging the capacity of humans to regress to a more primitive or animal state. Most of Stokes’s attention, however, is focused on figures such as Henry Salt and Edward Carpenter, Peter Kropotkin and Eliseé Reclus, who tried to resist Huxley’s pessimism. Stokes also surveys the wide range of topics – including vegetarianism and anti-vivisectionism – discussed in the Humanitarian League’s two main journals, pointing up the various tensions and

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paradoxes in humanitarian thinking at this time, as well as how it fed into, or found echoes in, the fiction and poetry of the period (in the work of writers like Hardy and Conrad). While acknowledging that the humanitarians’ positing of a universal human kinship, and their striving to maintain ‘ethical absolutes’, left them vulnerable to being dismissed as mere ‘cranks’ – particularly after the ‘horror’ of the First World War – Stokes nonetheless sees in recent ecological and green campaigns, eco-criticism, animal studies and debates about animal rights an attempt ‘to reawaken’ humanitarianism’s uplifting, ‘holistic’ vision. Richard Menke’s discussion of the impact of new communication technologies on the meaning of ‘information’ at the fin de siècle – and specifically on the ‘fears and fantasies’ it generated – provides a neat counterpoint to Kirsten MacLeod’s and Alison Chapman’s emphasis on the importance of material culture in the chapters that opened this section. Menke explains how technologies like the telegraph, telephone, cinema and wireless seemed, somewhat unsettlingly, to ‘dematerialise’ knowledge, allowing texts to ‘free themselves of matter, geography, contexts and extra verbiage in order to achieve a new speed and power’ – in essence, then, the very opposite of what was being aimed at in the fin-de-siècle fashion for decorated, collectable books, or for the ‘unity of graphic arts’ represented by the elaborately illustrated poems found in late nineteenth-century periodicals. Menke sees this new, disembodied notion of information as particularly important to empire and the late nineteenth-century’s ‘new imperialism’, showing how it influenced the ‘imperial visions’ of writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Stoker. Menke concludes his chapter with the suggestion that in its very ‘fragmentation and fecundity’ information could, paradoxically, represent ‘the nearest thing to a unifying modern phenomenon’. Taken as a whole, the eight chapters in Part I work to complicate the traditional identification of the fin de siècle with alienation, individualism, fragmentation and nihilism, by reminding us of the simultaneous importance, at the time, of principles of connectedness, community and kinship, and which could be sought not simply through a reactionary, jingoistic nationalism, but via the exploration of new kinds of spirituality, or new (albeit somewhat idealistic) ways of understanding the relationship between the human and natural world. The point of departure for Caroline McCracken-Flesher’s chapter, which opens Part II, is the tart (and rather timely) observation that ‘Until recently, the terms “Scotland” and “fin de siècle” seldom appeared together’, with the Scots being credited, at most, with merely ‘book-ending English fin-de-siècle issues and anxieties’. Her wideranging account of fin-de-siècle Scotland aims to overturn this prejudice, drawing attention to the rich variety of writing in this period, as well as to the ways in which it challenges, and in some instances, she argues, sets the terms for, those English preoccupations. She shows how the work of writers like Stevenson and John Davidson starts to look rather different when aligned with contemporary Scottish (rather than English) literary networks, while also acknowledging the range of Scottish writers (figures such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Buchanan, Mona Caird, J. M. Barrie, James Young Geddes, the Findlater sisters, William Sharp (‘Fiona MacLeod’), J. G. Frazer and Patrick Geddes) who took up residence in England, and ‘accreted power in British publishing’. Her overall contention is that Scottish fin-de-siècle writing is best understood ‘not as a delimited or national phenomenon, but rather as a problem posed to place and . . . time’. Through detailed references to the work of

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these authors she elaborates the singularity of their responses to familiar fin-de-siècle questions: to the challenges posed by contemporary (and especially Scottish) science; to ruptures between past and future; to pessimism, empire, decadence, mysticism, Celticism and gender; as well as to commerce and the market. Echoing a theme of this volume taken as a whole, her stress is on the ‘multifacetedness’ and ‘multiplicity’ of the moment, enacted, as she demonstrates at the close of her chapter, in the little magazine The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, edited by Geddes. Her conclusion, too, chimes with the findings of many other contributors: that far from fearing apocalypse, the Scotland ‘perched on the cusp of a century . . . didn’t see itself as the “end” of anything’. Ann Markey performs similar work for our understanding of Ireland, in that her chapter both acknowledges the ‘significant contribution’ of Irish writers, critics and dramatists in helping define the Victorian fin de siècle, and the importance of the Irish backgrounds of many familiar fin-de-siècle figures (especially women), and at the same time delineates what was distinctive in Irish culture at this time, which was, as she suggests, ‘differently constituted’. In this respect, she draws particular attention to a specifically Irish genre of ‘Land War novels’, as well as a large body of fiction addressing, with various degrees of explicitness, the ‘Home Rule’ question. Turning next to drama, she looks at the range of theatrical entertainment that was on offer to Dublin audiences in the late decades of the nineteenth century, including Irish nationalist melodramas and experimental dramas influenced by European models (such as Le Théâtre Libre, founded in Paris in 1887) as well as dramas associated with Irish revivalists, themselves – as she goes on to show – an extremely diverse group in their backgrounds and aims. Irish revivalism, in all its forms, and as Markey demonstrates, was not confined to the literary arena, but was also manifest in the visual arts and music, with Ireland (in 1894) having its own Arts and Crafts Society as well as (in 1896) the Feis Ceoil Association, aimed at showcasing traditional Irish music. Her chapter ends with a discussion of two phenomena rarely linked to the fin de siècle, but of key importance in Ireland at this time: the cultural significance of sport, as evidenced in the revival of traditional Gaelic games; and the growth of a distinctly Irish genre of children’s literature, inflected, as it was, with the nationalism that informed so many other cultural projects at this time. Like McCracken-Flesher, Markey concludes her chapter by stressing the ‘opportunities’ that the fin-de-siècle moment presented to Irish writers and artists, and the focus, through various revivalist movements, on ‘regeneration and the future’, rather than degeneration and endings. In this sense, for Markey, the Irish fin de siècle is perhaps best understood as the ‘chrysalis’ from which ‘modern Ireland’ emerged. The next two chapters in Part II narrow the geographical focus to the English Midlands, to consider, respectively, how two phenomena often taken as defining characteristics of the British fin de siècle – the fashion, via the ‘house beautiful’, for highly decorative aesthetic interiors, and the development of the so-called ‘new drama’ – were manifest outside London in the provinces. Margaret Ponsonby’s chapter on the construction of the village of Bournville (at the time situated on the outskirts of the city of Birmingham and adjacent to the Cadbury factory) opens a fascinating window onto contemporary ideas about an ‘ideal home’, which were in marked contrast with the elaborate interiors designed by figures such as Whistler. Ponsonby explains the role of Quakerism in the Cadburys’ thinking, noting that while it led to a welcome

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appreciation of the importance of outdoor space (the Bournville houses had generous gardens), it also brought in its train a prohibition on public houses (for consuming alcohol) and a normative concern for healthy living that amounted to a form of surveillance. The inhabitants (not all of whom were employees at the Cadbury factory) were regularly monitored, and rules for village life were rigorously policed. Ponsonby’s description of the village’s ‘show home’, inhabited by a certain ‘Mrs Hartle’, who was expected to be on display, in the sense of enacting an ‘ideal life’ to the village’s many visitors, underlines the distinctiveness of the Cadbury project, as compared with other types of show homes (private or public) at this time. The chapter also usefully brings into the frame a section of the population – the more prosperous working classes and lower middle classes – who have received relatively little attention in fin-de-siècle scholarship, focused, as it has so often been, on exploring the ‘decadent’ extremes of 1890s society, as manifest in the decayed aristocracy and degenerate urban underclass of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ponsonby’s account draws attention to the aspirations of this lower/middling group, and their role in shaping modernity, while simultaneously noting the high-handed way in which their sense of their domestic needs was overlooked, both at the time and, we might add, subsequently. Jo Robinson begins her chapter by commenting on the relative lack of attention in fin-de-siècle scholarship given to what she terms ‘spatialisation’, as opposed to problems of periodisation. The particular spatial relationship she is keen to explore, in relation to productions of the ‘new drama’ (that is, plays by Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wing Pinero), is that between London, on the one hand, and the Midlands cities of Nottingham and Birmingham, on the other. The question she poses is whether the fin de siècle was ‘solely a formation of metropolitan capitals’. Her chapter describes the distinctive regional identities and theatrical cultures of Birmingham and Nottingham, before going on to consider, by examining evidence from local newspapers and playbills, how the new drama was received in these cities. In relation to Ibsen, she notes that although his plays themselves could not be seen by local Nottingham or Birmingham audiences, the ideas contained in them did find their way to the provinces, and as the 1890s progressed, both cities became sufficiently familiar with his oeuvre for Ibsen to become, by 1895, the subject (for the local paper, The Birmingham Owl) of satire. Other (and arguably ‘safer’) new drama came more directly to the Midlands, in the form, as Robinson describes, of George Alexander’s London production of Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray, which generated a lively response in Birmingham’s local theatrical press, and Shaw’s Candida, advertised as coming to Nottingham as a part of a provincial tour, arranged because Shaw had been unable to secure a London run. Robinson’s evidence thus partly confirms and partly controverts assumptions about London’s cultural dominance at the fin de siècle. So although, as she acknowledges, the geography of Ibsen productions was indeed ‘London-bound’, regional audiences proved, albeit at a partial remove, less easily shocked by ‘new’ ideas than might have been assumed – ideas, as Richard Menke’s chapter reminds us, which circulated with remarkable rapidity at the fin de siècle. As Anna Vaninskaya (like Caroline McCracken-Flesher) observes at the opening of her chapter, Russia ‘rarely figures in traditional descriptions of the British cultural imaginary at the fin de siècle’, yet this was the moment at which British cultural interest in Russia – which dates back at least to the sixteenth century – began to rival more ‘established reference points such as France, Germany and Italy’. Drawing on a recent

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and growing body of critical work describing the Russian ‘presence’ in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Vaninskaya documents the variety of ways in which the fin-de-siècle British public came to ‘know’ Russia, drawing attention to the ‘late Victorian obsession with the melodrama of Russian politics, helpfully mythologised as a stand-off between the tsar and the revolutionary Nihilists’. She surveys an array of Nihilist-inspired novels and theatrical entertainments (including farces, burlettas, spectacular melodramas and drawing-room plays) that date back to the 1810s, but which reached something of a peak in the 1880s and 1890s, as the Nihilists became the ‘new favourite . . . cliché’ of stage and page, part of a ‘huge fin-desiècle swell of non-fictional accounts, travelogues and memoirs which took Nihilists, and the inevitable Siberian exile, as their subject’. She looks in detail at the work of the Russian exile, Sergey Stepniak, contrasting it with that of W. T. Stead. Readers familiar with Stead’s campaigning journalism in the Pall Mall Gazette may be surprised to see the tsar-loving Stead of Truth About Russia, who point-blank denied Nihilist accounts of the horrors of the Russian prison system. Like so many contributors to this volume, Vaninskaya stresses the diversity of reactions that Russia provoked, mediated through the convenient and popular trope of ‘political Nihilism’; she also shows how political affiliations – and, more broadly, ideas about transgression and subversion – were rarely straightforward, with allegiances shifting alarmingly depending on context. While Vaninskaya is surely correct to note a neglect of Russia in favour of attention to European influences, within Europe, as Stefano Evangelista’s chapter demonstrates, it is British (or more particularly English) engagement with Italy at the fin de siècle which repays further attention. Evangelista’s interest is in the development of English Aestheticism, and how it was shaped through particular understandings of Italian culture – which he traces through the attitudes to Italy found in the writings of John Ruskin, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Ouida and Lee. Evangelista charts a shift in what he terms the ‘sepulchral’ Italy of Ruskin and Pater (which more or less ignored the profound political, social and cultural changes Italy had undergone in the second half of the century, and particularly from the 1870s onwards) to – in a second generation of aesthetic writers (Symonds, Ouida, Lee) – a more nuanced appreciation of Italy’s ‘modernity as well as its past’, which included ‘displaying an increased curiosity towards modern Italians’. He describes how Ouida, for example, was influenced by contemporary Italian verismo, as well as her early championing of Gabriele D’Annunzio; likewise Evangelista explains the importance to Lee’s work of her friendship with figures such as Carlo Placci and Enrico Nencioni. Evangelista’s overall argument is that fin-de-siècle Anglo-Italian cultural relations need to be understood as a two-way process of influence, or a form of cross-fertilisation, in which English writers found in Italy inspiration for their theorisation of an ideal of aesthetic autonomy, and this Italian-inflected English Aestheticism was then exported back to Italians by Anglophiles such as D’Annunzio and Nencioni. In this way, Evangelista shows that European countries (like Italy or indeed France) provided more than a simple opposition to, or refuge from, a declining or corrupt Britain; while also reminding us of the complex origins of the ideas about modernity which emerged at this time. As with the contributions to Part I, the weight of evidence in the chapters that make up Part II points toward an optimism and positivity that is at odds with popular clichés about fin-de-siècle pessimism. Scotland and Ireland, as McCracken-Flesher and

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Markey show, seemed much more focused on renewal than on decline; likewise, the provinces – in the shape of the English Midlands – had their own projects and agendas that, while taking cues from London, were by no means defined by, or subservient to, the metropolis. A further (and perhaps more surprising) theme to emerge from these chapters is how readily fin-de-siècle anxieties could be dissipated by humour, whether through satires on Ibsen, or the patent absurdities of treatments of Russian terrorism in popular fiction and drama. And while it is always tempting to see in such reactions a form of conservatism, a containment of what threatens by belittling it (often noted, for example, in Du Maurier’s lampooning of Aestheticism in Punch), modern fin-de-siècle scholarship arguably needs to attend more to the sheer entertainment value of the apocalyptic. Jad Adams’s chapter, which opens Part III, takes a fresh look at various (and, he argues, generally neglected, at least by the early male mythologisers of the fin de siècle) ‘new women’ in the 1890s. He begins by acknowledging their presence in the 1890s publishing industry – as authors, as subjects who sold copy and (in some cases) as editors. But he also shows, through a discussion of figures such as Ella D’Arcy (for a time assistant editor of The Yellow Book), Ethel Colburn Mayne (an Irish translator and writer of short stories and novels), Ella Hepworth Dixon and George Egerton, that that same industry could be highly exploitative of young women, and among the ‘new women’ themselves there was little sense of female solidarity, and in their writings, little sense of optimism as regards female independence. However, for certain economically privileged new women, there was, Adams argues, greater freedom, particularly to explore ‘alternative’ sexualities, if only because a gender imbalance in the population meant that women living together (in whatever way) became relatively ‘commonplace’. Here the poet Olive Custance stands as an example: affluent enough not to need to earn her living, she was free to write and to form intimate relationships with both men and women (eventually marrying Alfred Douglas). Adams closes his chapter with a discussion of the attempts to live more liberated lives by the poets Graham R. Thomson (Rosamund Ball) and Lelia MacDonald (wife of Hubert Crackanthorpe), and the novelist Ménie Muriel Dowie. As Adams shows, although each woman enjoyed some professional success, none found lasting personal happiness: women may have had a more active cultural role in the fin de siècle than early (male) commentators were prepared to concede, yet the price of their participation – Adams shows – remained high. The subject of Catherine Hindson’s chapter, as she acknowledges, might seem, at first glance, to be a mere footnote to theatrical history: the four performances which make up the full production history of Sensa: A Mystery Play in Three Acts, adapted by the bestselling author Mable Collins and celebrity actress Maud Hoffman. Hindson’s purpose in her painstaking reconstruction of this apparently ‘minor occasion’, is to shed new light on the ‘grand narratives of the fin de siècle and modernism(s)’ – and in particular, and in this instance, on our understanding of the role, at that time, of the occult and of mysticism, as well as the professional possibilities open to women. She thus uses the case of Sensa to look at ‘theatre, politics, religion, women and theatrical production’ at the fin de siècle. She begins by describing Sensa, a play in which ‘narrative, rituals, music, speech and embodied performances are interwoven’, contextualising it, as might be conventionally done, in relation to of symbolist drama and theosophical beliefs. This account, however, is set out largely in order to act as

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a counterpoint to the real work of the chapter, which is to show how the placing of Collins and Hoffman, as professional women, at the centre of the story changes our understanding both of Sensa and of fin-de-siècle notions of performance more generally. Hindson thus proceeds to examine Collins’s writing career as a whole, noting her success as an author of sensation fiction; likewise, she draws attention to Hoffman’s acting and her self-conscious ‘staging of [a] celebrity self’, as well as to the role of another female professional – Florence Etlinger – whose Theatre School hosted three of the performances of Sensa. Hindson’s argument is that when all this material is brought together, the esoteric elements of Sensa, far from being the expression of some archetypal fin-de-siècle angst or exoticism, are more properly viewed as part and parcel of popular theatrical and fiction ‘leisure industries’, in which women like Collins, Hoffman and Etlinger flourished. Alexis Easley picks up, and develops further, strands of argument found in both Adams’s and Hindson’s chapters. So she, too, comments on conflicts between different groups of women at the fin de siècle, and more specifically, the intergenerational divisions between the ‘old lady’, ‘new woman’ and ‘new girl’ (or ‘advanced young woman’). Easley acknowledges that there were striking differences in the ways that women readers and writers at the fin de siècle experienced print culture, in comparison with their mothers or grandmothers; yet she sees these roles of ‘old lady’, ‘new woman’ and ‘new girl’ less as lived realities than as strategic constructions of the periodical press, and most particularly, of the growing numbers of women’s magazines. In a burgeoning celebrity culture, which fetishised youthful female beauty, intergenerational differences could be mobilised, Easley argues, in different ways – sometimes troped as competitive, sometimes as collaborative – in order to sell copy. She thus shows how in feminist magazines, like Shafts and the Suffragette, female solidarity between the ‘new girl’ and her ‘progressive’ foremother was constructed partly through their opposition to a demonised ‘old woman’, and partly through their identification as a new kind of consumer – for goods such as ‘Vilmar’s Hand Cream’. The Lady’s Realm, which might be thought of as a more conservative magazine, gave space, Easley argues, to both anti-feminist and feminist views, with its fictional content containing an especially strong endorsement of the ‘new girl’, albeit (as in Shafts and the Suffragette) alongside ubiquitous advertisements for jewellery, household goods and cosmetics. The modern woman represented in fin-de-siècle periodical culture, Easley suggests, was ‘a consumer and an advertising commodity, a sensationalist figure of controversy and a symbol of the new spirit of the age’. The role of Judaism in Victorian culture in general, and a consideration, at the fin de siècle, of the so-called ‘Jewish question’, in particular, are today much less neglected topics than they used to be; likewise, late nineteenth-century Jewish women writers, such as Amy Levy, are now more or less incorporated into the canon. It is precisely this greater familiarity that allows Richa Dwor to bring into view the career of an arguably less well-appreciated figure in fin-de-siècle Jewish life: a founder of liberal Judaism, Lily Montagu. Montagu’s importance, Dwor argues, lies partly in her activism (which was lifelong and began at a young age), and partly in the unique way that she brought her religious faith (Judaism) and her politics (socialism) into productive relationship. Neither new woman nor new girl – in the terms that Easley sets out – Montagu did, nonetheless, carve out a successful if unorthodox career path, one which began with her founding of the West Central Jewish Club in 1893 and reached ‘its apex’ in an

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1899 article written for the Jewish Quarterly Review. Dwor maps Montagu’s social work and theology in relation to heated debates about the Sabbath and the ‘sweated industries’ with which Jews were so closely associated, and at a moment when AngloJewry itself was being riven by anxieties about socialism ‘in its midst’. She shows how, in her activism and her writings, Montagu ‘wished to use religion as a means to achieve social change’, but only by insisting that religion, too, had to ‘accommodate the social’. Dwor’s chapter stands as an important reminder that the models for female independence in the 1890s were in practice more varied than suggested by the stereotypes pedalled in contemporary women’s magazines; and that the work of modernity (and women’s contributions to it) involved many different kinds of communities. Where Dwor brings to light hitherto hidden, or marginalised, aspects of female agency at the fin de siècle, Emily Coit’s chapter revisits (in order to re-evaluate) what she terms a ‘site of foundational feminist scholarship’. She brings together several well-known elements of fin-de-siècle thinking about female gender and sexual difference, including class, race (via evolutionary theory and eugenics), health (through the diagnosis of ailments such as ‘nervousness’ and ‘neurasthenia’) and motherhood – but in order to ask new questions about them. In the process, she challenges some of the assumptions that have underpinned past feminist criticism, while also picking up on ideas about female/feminist solidarity raised (albeit it in different ways) by Adams and Easley. Her focus is on two iconic turn-of-the-century ‘feminist’ writers – Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton – as well as, by implication, the nature of the alleged fin-de-siècle ‘sexual anarchy’ to which they have been seen as central. Coit explains how the ideas in Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898) informed – often quite programmatically – much of her fiction, but in ways which (when it involved engagements with the work of Darwin and Spencer) were not always ‘strictly oppositional and revolutionary’. Thus Gilman’s fictional imagining of a form of ‘gynocratic cooperation’ in the bearing and rearing of children was underwritten, Coit shows, by familiar Victorian assumptions about the ‘incompatibility of intellectual labour and motherhood’. Likewise, in Wharton’s fiction, Coit finds similar tensions between the portrayal of the female body and female intellect. Both writers, she suggests, made use of contemporary science to ‘construct a female’ whose decision ‘to claim agency and exercise intellect renders her sterile and imperils her race’ – an ‘antiquated’ view that sits uncomfortably with their associations by modern critics with feminism and modernity. Taken together, the chapters in Part III warn against making simplistic generalisations about women’s roles and the nature of feminism – as well as anxieties about it – at the fin de siècle. While continuing the project of writing women back into the fin de siècle by testifying to their creative agency – whether in publishing, in the theatre, in religion or in politics – these chapters also point up the persistence of barriers to women’s participation in culture, barriers which women themselves could sometimes be complicit in constructing and maintaining. The final part of this volume also begins by revisiting, in order to revise, some familiar ground: the ‘scientification’ – as Ina Linge terms it – of homosexuality at the fin de siècle. Linge’s chapter centres on a re-examination of the sexological research in Britain and Germany that has been seen to underpin the understandings of same-sex desire that developed at this time. She argues (against Foucault) that the new ‘sexual sciences’ should be viewed as ‘a productive force concerned with social justice, not

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turned towards endings, but opened to a broad field of interdisciplinary discussions’ – that they are about ‘seeking connections’. Of key importance is Linge’s methodology, in that it is her attention to print culture, and to the details behind the writing and dissemination of specific sexological works, that enables her to show how the varied terminology that emerged to describe same-sex desire at the fin de siècle was in practice ‘far from exclusively medical’; rather, she suggests, it was influenced by an eclectic mix of ‘Greek and Latin history’, ‘Hungarian literature’ and ‘sexual rights politics’. Linge moves on to an analysis of the work of two of the most prominent sexologists of the period – Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld – demonstrating how strongly their writings were influenced by literary tropes, by larger cultural and social concerns, as well as by developments in other media, such as photography and film. Her overall argument is that ‘medico-scientific’ thinking about same-sex desire – the new sexology that emerged at the fin de siècle – was deeply ‘interdisciplinary’, an example of ‘Wissenschaft, in the broadest sense’. Linge’s research suggests that rather than seeing the fin de siècle as defined by a new medicalisation or pathologisation of certain kinds of behaviour – whether sexual, literary or artistic (and as traditionally associated with definitions of decadence) – we would do better to reverse this perspective. Thus what is singular at this time, in her view, is not the dominating explanatory power of the new quasi-sciences of sexology, but the formative role of literary and artistic tropes in their creation. Gerald Monsman’s chapter also takes as its point of departure some well-known (and arguably, perhaps, well-worn) views of the late nineteenth-century adventure story, suggesting that the academic discourse that surrounds this body of work, with its ‘sweeping pronouncements’ about ‘the colonial mentality’, ‘Eurocentrism’, ‘gendered viewpoints’, ‘racism’, ‘cultural imperialism’ and ‘oppressive power relationships’, misses the works’ complexity and sophistication. More specifically, he argues against Patrick Brantlinger’s concept of an ‘imperial gothic’ which allegorises ‘a repressed fear of demonic incursion’ or ‘of “civilization” turning into its opposite’, instead seeing in the Anglo-African adventure novel ‘an opportunity in Africa to rekindle vitality absent from Western culture’. That is, for these Western writers, according to Monsman, Africa provided the means to ‘resist modernism’s yoke of bondage’ and its ‘deterministic entanglement’; and it created for its readers an imaginative reality that was underpinned by a particular historical or documentary ‘truth’. His chapter centres on close readings of works by H. Rider Haggard, Bertram Mitford, Ernest Glanville, Henry Merriman and W. C. Scully, in which he argues trenchantly for the ongoing value of adventure fiction; it engages with colonisation, Monsman suggests, ‘no less penetratingly’ and often ‘in a more timely fashion’ than that of better-known ‘highbrow’ works, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which he also discusses. Caroline Reitz observes that a ‘dominant’ way of thinking about the development of detective fiction at the fin de siècle is to see it (as Monsman suggests adventure fiction has been viewed) as primarily a ‘conservative phenomenon’ which serves a cathartic function in terms of exposing and then vanquishing the various crises and anxieties that threaten the social order, especially as manifest in the troubled relationship between Britain and empire. Key to this idea, for Reitz, is the role of knowledge and specialisation, and the apparently unique ability of the detective to make sense of this ‘wider world’. Through a close examination of three detective fictions – Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade and Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear – Reitz argues

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that the detective, more often than not, fails fully to understand the mystery in front of him (or, in the case of Wade, her) and that the genre – at least during this period – more typically testifies to the inadequacy of professional knowledge to apprehend (and thus control) the world, and to a persisting and threatening sense of violence and social chaos that eludes the detective’s grasp. For Reitz, the distinguishing feature of the fin-de-siècle detective story is therefore the way that it suggests the ‘limits of knowledge’, particularly when applied to the South Africa to which Hilda Wade flees, or the Vermissa Valley in Conan Doyle’s story, in which crime is ‘wider and more complex’ than can be grasped by the ‘expertise of the detective’. Anxieties about maleness and masculinity, especially in relation to the expression of same-sex desire and fears about the dissolution of empire, are the most assiduously theorised of all the tropes associated with the Victorian fin de siècle, with the trial of Oscar Wilde – involving, as it did, both domestic and overseas sexual transgressions8 – standing as the archetypal fin-de-siècle moment. It is a moment which has often been seen as marking the ambition of the provocation associated with fin-de-siècle experimentation (whether in life or in art), as well as the ruthlessness of the attempted ‘establishment’ annihilation of it. The male identities discussed in Part IV, however, speak more (as so many other chapters in this volume do) to an acknowledgement of the limits of such control and comprehension; as well as, and more positively, to the opportunities (rather than simply fears) which that failure opened up for new forms of reimagining.

Notes 1. For British examples of such genre paintings, see, for example, the interior scenes of John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–93), which often used his own house in Scarborough as a setting; the promotion of the ‘aesthetic interior’ through photographs and portraiture is discussed in Gere and Hoskins (2000: 109–31). 2. Burdette’s summary article was written for the British Library ‘Discovering Literature’ series, and is designed to introduce readers to the library’s rich collections in this area. 3. Saler describes the history of fin-de-siècle scholarship as being comprised of three waves. A first wave was focused on memorialising, influence and periodisation. A second wave saw a concern with literary and artistic practices extended to encompass developments in science, medicine, religion, philosophy, technology, media and transportation systems, and led to the fin de siècle being viewed as a broad socio-cultural phenomenon, marking out a distinct period of change – what Saler terms, following Bayly (2003), the ‘crucible of modernity’. And finally, there is a third, ‘global’ wave, which the contributions to The Fin de Siècle World aim to exhibit. 4. Marshall’s introductory volume covers the following concepts, influences and patterns of thought: psychology, decadence and aestheticism, sexual identity, socialism, empire, the visual arts, publishing practices, the new woman, realism, fantastic fiction, varieties of performance and poetry. 5. As does the long-running journal English Literature in Transition. 6. The impetus behind this stretching of boundaries has come in part from revisionist accounts of specific late nineteenth-century literary movements, such as Aestheticism (for early examples of which, see Schaffer (2000) and Psomiades and Shaffer (1999)); from a growing body of scholarship challenging the claims to novelty associated with literary modernism, and emphasising the continuities between Victorian and fin-de-siècle writers

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and artists, and between fin-de-siècle writers and artists and those writing in the early decades of the twentieth century; as well as from revisionist accounts of the history of sexuality which contest both the ‘sexual panic’ identified by Showalter (1990) and the idea that distinct sexual identities emerged at this time in the ways that earlier historians had claimed (see, for example, Cocks (2003)). Cumulatively, these accounts challenge the idea that there is any neat division or turning point between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while also positing different decades (for example, the 1870s) as witnesses to more significant changes in literary and artistic values and practices, and more consistent evidence of formal innovation, than those which are held to have occurred in the 1890s. 7. This issue is also discussed by Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee in relation to the global turn in Dickens scholarship (as seen, for example, in works such as Jordan and Perera (2012) and the ‘Global Circulation Project’, for which Regenia Gagnier is editor-in-chief). As Lee puts it: ‘directing attention to places and regions that fall outside the usual Anglo-American contexts . . . raise[s] questions about the methodological challenges that such projects encounter, especially in relation to the hard-struck balance between the attempt to map out the global circulation of particular authors and texts and the need to attend to local specificities’ (2016: 145). 8. Baylen and McBath (1985) uncovered evidence that the prime minister, Lord Rosebery, had ordered British representatives in Italy to monitor Wilde’s and Douglas’s activities when they were in that country; other evidence uncovered by Holland (2003) suggests that one reason why Douglas was not brought to trial with Wilde, or called upon to give evidence, was because of fears about the nature of his connections with senior government officials, including the relationship between his brother (Lord Drumlanrig), who was killed in a mysterious shooting accident, and Rosebery, a known homosexual. Wilde’s and Douglas’s sexual relationships with young male prostitutes in Algiers were controversially discussed by André Gide in his 1924 autobiographical volume, Si le grain ne meurt. For a further discussion of this topic see Guy and Small (2006).

Works Cited Arata, S. (1999), ‘1897’, in H. F. Tucker (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 51–68. Baylen, J. and R. L. McBath (1985), ‘A Note on Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and Lord Rosebery’, English Language Notes, 23: 42–8. Bayly, C. A. (2003), The Birth of the Modern World, Oxford: Blackwell. Brantlinger, P. (1988), Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Burdette, C. (2017), ‘Aestheticism and Decadence’, http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/ articles/aestheticism-and-decadence#authorBlock1 Cockin, K. (ed.) (2013), The Literary North, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cocks, H. G. (2003), Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century, London: I. B. Tauris. Cohen, E. (1993), Talk on the Wilde Side, London: Routledge. Dowling, L. (1986), Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dowling, L. (1979), ‘The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1980s’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33: 343–53. Gere, C. and L. Hoskins (2000), The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior, Aldershot: Lund Humphries. Guy, J. and I. Small (2006), ‘Lives of Wilde’, in J. Guy and I. Small, Studying Oscar Wilde: History, Criticism & Myth, University of North Carolina, Greensboro: ELT Press, pp. 23–9. Holland, M. (2003), Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess, London: Fourth Estate.

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Jordan, J. and N. Perera (eds) (2012), Global Dickens, London: Ashgate. Ledger, S. and R. Luckhurst (eds) (2000), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, K. H. Y. (2016), Charles Dickens and China, 1895–1915: Cross-Cultural Encounters, London and New York: Routledge. Marshall, G. (2007), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siecle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mole, T. (2007), Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutics of Intimacy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Psomiades, K. and T. Shaffer (eds) (1999), Women and British Aestheticism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pykett, L. (ed.) (1996), Reading Fin-de-Siècle Fictions, London: Longman Saler, M. (2015), The Fin de Siècle World, London and New York: Routledge. Schaffer, T. (ed.) (2006), Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, New York and London: Pearson, Longman Schaffer, T. (2000), The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Showalter, E. (1990), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, New York: Viking. Stokes, J. (ed.) (1992), Fin de Siècle/Fin du Globe, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Weeks, J. (1977), Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, London: Quartet.

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I. Concepts

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2 The Matter of Form: Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Poetry and the Periodical Press Alison Chapman

Form is everything. It is the secret of life. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891)

The Visual Field of Poetry

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ne of the most distinctive magazines of the fin de siècle, Oscar Wilde’s Woman’s World (1887–90), published ‘Legend of the Blush Roses’ as a full-page illustrated poem that exemplified the turn towards the visual rendering of poetry and poetic form. The poem, by Beatrice Crane, is embedded into the page layout (or mise en page) of the illustration by her father, Walter Crane (Fig. 2.1). The highly ornamental page, with its disproportionately large decorated capital, handwritten script, and the scroll with heart-shaped petals flurrying over it, treats the poem as part of the visual space of the page, positioned as if overlaying and peeling away from the illustration of Cupid whispering into the rose. The archaic stylised script echoes the tangle of roses just above and to the left, and the design implies that the monochrome page becomes metaphorically tinted with the blush of the rose, flushed with pleasure at the erotic tale whispered by Cupid. In this exuberantly illustrated poem, the difference between the space of the poem and the illustrative design is blurred. The poem’s form is less a lexical container than a visual field. As this striking example indicates, the fin-de-siècle aesthetics of integration between text and illustration offered the magazines of the 1880s and 1890s an opportunity to experiment with design in a way that challenged the conventional definition of poetic form as a linguistic space. While Walter Crane was a prominent illustrator, designer and artist, his daughter Beatrice was not a well-known poet. Indeed she was aged just fourteen or fifteen when the poem was published.1 Acknowledging the significance of periodicals in this era discloses the diversity of poetry at the fin de siècle, and in particular makes visible experiments with illustrating poetic form that challenge conventional accounts. Debates about the relationship between word and image were, in fact, central to fin-de-siècle aesthetics. Walter Crane’s 1892 Claims of Decorative Art argues that the ‘harmonious relation in all the arts’ is a ‘necessity’ (Crane 1892: vi). In his chapter on decorative arts, Crane asserts that ‘I know no better definition of beauty than it is “the most varied unity, the most united variety” ’ (6), which is the bulwark against vulgarities of modern life, with its ‘monsters of our time clad in plate-glass,

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Figure 2.1 Beatrice Crane, ‘Legend of the Blush Roses’, Woman’s World, February 1888: 177. cast-iron, and fortified in desirable residences’ (6). The artist offers a counter to the dissonance of modernity: a total work of art, in which every element contributes to the aesthetic whole. In this new artistic manifesto the visual field has priority, and style matters over content, in a provocative rebuff to earlier Victorian realist modes of representation. ‘Legend of the Blush Roses’ entangles poem with illustration in one whole, so that the form of the poem becomes inseparable from its graphic design. The prominent, typographically broken first line, ‘Little love / was running wild’, represents the claims for the unity of art, where every part expresses the aesthetics of the whole, even if a line loses some coherence because it does not fit into the space. In Woman’s World, the Crane collaboration expresses the politicised aesthetics of the magazine, a progressive and yet also carefully commodified world for the woman reader (also discussed in this volume by Alexis Easley). The magazine was fashioned by Wilde as a distinctive title for the era, defined against its earlier incarnation as Lady’s World. Wilde included poems from many prominent and emerging contemporary poets, and especially women, such as A. Mary F. Robinson, Violet Fane, Arthur Symons, Edith Nesbit, Rosamund Marriott Watson and Amy Levy. There were also similar magazines publishing poetry in this period under the influence of the new turn

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to aestheticism, such as Atalanta (1887–98) and The Magazine of Art (1878–1904), which prominently featured full-page illustrations that embedded the poems (by both emerging poets and established poets) in the page design. However, while this style of highly decorative poems was rejected by later magazines, such as The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884–94), The Yellow Book (1894–7) and The Dome (1897–1900), out of a disdain for what The Yellow Book prospectus termed ‘the bad old traditions of periodical literature’, these titles nonetheless continued to embed the poems in an overdetermined and highly stylised mise en page. The emphasis on the visual impact of magazine poems was not wholly new. The mid-nineteenth-century explosion of periodicals in the late 1850s and 1860s exploited the magazine’s visual field as it took advantage of new printing technologies. For example, Dickens’s Once a Week (1859–80) featured poems and illustrations on a single page, offering what Linda K. Hughes terms ‘visual effects’: ‘when poems are paired with illustrations, the status of each becomes relativized’ (Hughes 2010: 42). Such ‘visual effects’ make the author and artist less individually prominent, to focus instead on the organic coherence of the page. Late-century magazines continued to experiment with such ‘visual effects’, but with a different emphasis. The status of poem and image in 1880s and 1890s magazines was reconfigured, with the result that the poem was immersed in the visual field as a visual device. As Lorraine Janzen Kooistra argues, while traditionally the image was placed secondary to the verbal text as a relationship that conventionally genders a male text and a ‘marginal, peripheral, detachable’ female visual text, the late Victorian illustrated book was a ‘hybrid form’ with ‘a more fluid continuum’ of relationships (Kooistra 1995: 9, 11, 12). In fin-de-siècle magazines, the artist and designer overtly asserted primacy over the writer. Victorian illustrated poetry, as Kooistra outlines, involved multiple negotiations of writer and illustrator, and the prestige given to illustrations meant that an artist ‘was the writer’s equal partner in the production of meaning’ (Kooistra 2002: 394). At the end of the century, ‘when the printed text and illustrative scheme were conceived as a decorative whole by a single guiding hand’, the poems’ typographical and textual features mattered (Kooistra 2002: 414). Such features that are specific to serials are termed ‘periodical codes’ by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, adapting Jerome J. McGann’s term for paratextual features of a text, ‘bibliographical codes’ (Brooker and Thacker 2009: 5–6). These codes shape what Kooistra terms the text’s ‘bitextuality’, or the gendered dynamics between text and image at the end of the century. The innovation in treating page and poem as not only one compositional unit, but one decorative element that was in line with the magazine’s overall aesthetics and design, renders poetic form newly material and newly graphic. The convention from the late 1850s of placing poetry overtly in a visual field thus becomes, from the 1880s, defining poetry as a visual field. This shift that made poems into visual devices also made visible the emerging late nineteenth-century poetics that rejected the expressive representational conventions of earlier poetry. As Nicholas Frankel argues, fin-de-siècle literature revelled in the Wildean mask, the surface of the literary that was figured in the material object of the book through attention to typographical and visual flourishes (Frankel 2009). This materialism of print was then part of the fin-de-siècle turn to stylisation, as well as allusion, symbolism, indirectness and often also difficulty – ‘defensive moves’, as Isobel Armstrong notes, ‘to preserve a unique mode of utterance for poetry in the face of a political and technological culture which largely ignored it’ (Armstrong 1993: 480). Shaken loose from the confines of earlier-century debates about the properties and proprieties of poetics, decadent

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and aestheticist poetry revels in the dissolution of generic conventions and the vague impressions that foretell avant-garde modernist poetry. Pater’s influential reformulation, in the 1873 ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, of aesthetic experience, as transient, physiological impressions that make and unmake the self, offers art as flux, resistant to representation and also analysis. Form is nothing and everything, in Wilde’s epigrammatic insult in ‘The Critic as Artist’ to the Arnoldian emphasis on the moral power of poetry (Wilde 1891: 163), from which, as Karen Alkalay-Gut suggests, 1890s poetry radically diverged (Alkalay-Gut 2000: 228). For Pater, aesthetic experience, representation and analysis evade the fixity of form, and yet the right form is paramount. The visual field of poetry in 1880s and 1890s magazines made overt the limits of form and celebrated style over content, surface over depth, visuality over expressivity. Placing the poem as intrinsic to the graphic design of the page was part of the Arts and Crafts Movement’s promotion of illustrated books as decorative, ornamental and pictured. Poems were offered as objects of consumption, placed as integral to the decorative design rather than in relationship with it as a separate unit in the page. Illustration and text were both part of the unified or total work of art that typified Arts and Crafts book making, such as that of the Kelmscott Press, and also the Wagnerian synthesised Gesamtkunstwerk (or total, synthesised, work of art) that, as Koenraad Claes and Marysa Demoor argue, dominated periodicals in the first half of the 1890s, and that strove for a hyper-stylised ‘art work complete in itself, of which every single aspect was artistic’ (Claes and Demoor 2010: 134). Claes and Demoor state that the high aesthetic aspirations of these magazines were an attempt to ‘help their publication escape the ephemeral fate of the average periodical’ (134), most obviously evidenced by the ‘book’ embedded in the title The Yellow Book. Other more critically neglected magazines played on the ephemeral status of serial print media in their complete aestheticised issues as part of a totalising aesthetic. The inclusion of poems in their numbers – as a temporal pause from pages of print and/or images, and also as cultural capital – was integral to the commodification and cultural value of serialised print. The material format of the magazine number was intrinsic to the hyper-aesthetic design and the new understanding of poetic form as embedded within the typographical and compositional layout of the page. But rather than offering the poem as merely decorative or ornamental, this new illustrative practice suggested an expansive and mobile concept of poetic form.

Decorated Poems While earlier Victorian magazines offered poems and illustrations as either juxtaposed within the same page or adjacent on consecutive pages, sometimes the poem was included within the illustration unit in a manner that prefigures the ‘Legend of the Blush Roses’. And yet, in these cases, the poem and image were still separately demarcated. For example, Tennyson’s new year poem in Good Words for 1 March 1868, illustrated by Lord Leighton, incorporates the poem in a visually delineated space to the right, embellished by a decorative capital and by a partial overlap with the illustration, placing the personified head of the old year blowing a winter storm just underneath the poet’s name (Fig. 2.2).2 Leighton’s design mirrors the illustration that takes up most of the facing page except for a two-line epigraph from Tennyson’s poem: ‘I stood on a tower in the wet, / And New Year and Old Year met.’ Although the poem’s subject of old year and new year meeting is mirrored in the poem’s illustration and the facing page picture, the poem is not intrinsic to the design but still a separate

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Figure 2.2 Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘1865–1866’, Good Words, 1 March 1868: 144. compositional unit. Tennyson’s poem, in this long-running magazine that was one of the most important serials for disseminating Victorian poetry, is part of the crowded space of the page, but the illustrative design is still graphically separate from the poem. In contrast, compare the appearance of Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ in Atalanta for December 1887, where the illustrated poem again faces a picture (Raphael’s Madonna Della Granduca) that relates to the poem only by virtue of sharing a similar broad theme (Rossetti 1887: 154). This disjunction between poem and facing-page picture, as opposed to a seamless, immersive integration of poem and image, is further underlined by the illustrative treatment of the poem itself, in which the unnamed illustrator places each of Rossetti’s stanzas in a visual space that functions like an ornament on the Christmas branch (Fig. 2.3). This poetic design interrupts the otherwise naturalistic branch, an effect highlighted by the exuberant ornamental letter that begins the poem and that also markedly contrasts, in its formal detail, with the depiction of the vertical foliage. The contents page of the collated annual volume terms this poem ‘decorated’ rather than ‘illustrated’, and indeed it makes more sense to talk of this poem in these

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Figure 2.3 Christina Rossetti, ‘A Christmas Carol’, Atalanta, December 1887: 154. terms. Rossetti’s repeated stanzaic quintet scheme, abccb, places the ‘a’ rhyme as a refrain that repeats in the first and last stanza, and changes in the middle five to begin ‘Lord God’. The five lines of the stanza are echoed in the five stanzas of the poem. This stanzaic form is visually displayed by the design of the page, which plays on the enveloping form by alternating the placement of the stanzas from the left to the right of the branch so that the reader’s eye moves both downwards and also across the page. The replication of the poet’s signature at the top of the page also highlights the design’s tension between naturalistic and ornamental, as the signature is a replica of the real hand of the poet, authentic yet mechanically reproduced, figuring the poem itself in the magazine. Christina Rossetti can hardly of course be described as a fin-de-siècle poet, but she represented an earlier iteration of aestheticism that was admired by the avant-garde poetry of the 1880s and 1890s, exemplified by Housman’s illustrations to the 1893 edition of her first published volume, Goblin Market, originally illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Rossetti 1893). One of the features of late nineteenth-century magazines was their remediation of earlier poetry in the new mise en page. Rossetti’s ‘A Christmas

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Carol’, decorated (rather than illustrated) in Atalanta, incorporates poem into image to render questionable, and also visible and material, the boundary between the poem’s form and the visual interpretation. The decorated page poem makes poetic form newly matter, at the hands of illustrators that came into a new prominence in this era, inspired by the earlier 1860s golden age of Pre-Raphaelite woodcut illustration. The poem’s embeddedness in the periodical’s ‘whole work of art’ is also apparent in Cassell’s Magazine of Art, a serial which ran from 1878 to 1904 as a lower-brow companion to the Art-Journal, and which regularly published poems as a feature of its design aesthetic. Christina Rossetti’s sonnet ‘An Echo from Willowwood’ (Fig. 2.4) was published in the January 1890 issue, illustrated by the eminent artist, illustrator, publisher and typographer Charles Ricketts (Rossetti 1890). Rossetti sent the poem to the

Figure 2.4 Christina Rossetti, ‘An Echo from Willowwood’, Magazine of Art, January 1890: 385.

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magazine editor, Marion Harry Spielmann, on 27 August 1888 with the comment that the poem was ‘capable of illustration’ (Harrison 2004: 87). In other words, she targeted the magazine for its visual interpretation of poems. ‘An Echo from Willowwood’ is a prime poem for illustration, because of its intertextual relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s House of Life sonnets. Christina Rossetti’s submission of a poem that engages with her brother’s sonnets, after her brother had died in 1882, and a poem that was written around 1870 just after her brother’s were first published in 1869 (Rossetti 1904: 386), suggests her attempt to insert the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic into the fin-de-siècle print culture aesthetics which it influenced. The magazine’s choice of Ricketts as illustrator is apt, as he represented the new style of artist who brought forward the legacy of the Pre-Raphaelites into the 1880s and 1890s. Ricketts produced many poetry illustrations for Woman’s World and Atalanta, and he was formative in producing the innovative magazine Dial. Ricketts was profoundly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite magazine and book illustrations of the 1860s and, as Michael Brooks points out, learned wood engraving as a craft at a time when the technique was outdated (Brooks 1970: 303). Ricketts was also known as a book designer as well as a publisher and, together with Charles Shannon, designed some of Wilde’s book volumes. Christina Rossetti’s sonnet placed her remediation of Pre-Raphaelitism within late-century verbal-visual magazine culture, and Ricketts’s profound debt to the Pre-Raphaelites made him an appropriate illustrator. The Magazine of Art publication of ‘An Echo from Willowwood’ embeds the poem in the graphic design of the page. Printed in italic font, and placed with a box laid partly over the full-page image, with white lateral margins, the poem is foregrounded and yet also integrated into the design. This liminal placement is highlighted by the poem’s right edge, positioned on the right-hand margin of the illustrative design. The effect is to make the space of the poem seem tipped into the margin, as if the reader could lift up the poem and find the rest of the illustration underneath. But the superimposition effect of the poem on the illustrated page is juxtaposed with the diptych design, by which the top half of the page depicts the sonnet’s octave, and the bottom half the sestet. And the mark of the poem’s volta exactly corresponds with the transition bar between the two halves of the illustration, a bar that bears in truncated form the poem’s epigraph from Dante Gabriel Rossetti: ‘O ye all ye that walk in Willowwood’. Thus, Rickett’s design repeats the formal division in the poem, replicating the octave and sestet division. The full-page illustration incorporates as an organic unity the poem’s Petrarchan form, but at the same time the poem’s form is intrinsic to the format of the page. The poem’s literary form becomes the graphic format, exceeding the lexical bounds of the poem to incorporate the mise en page. Rickett as designer augments Christina Rossetti as poet, and remediates her as a fin-de-siècle writer, uncovering the Pre-Raphaelite origins of fin-de-siècle aesthetics, and making Pre-Raphaelitism vital and material for a late nineteenth-century audience. Christina’s poem echoes her brother’s, and Ricketts echoes them both in an illustration that combines the Pre-Raphaelite style above and art nouveau below. The top half of the design looks like a pastiche of Pre-Raphaelite 1860s illustration. The bottom half, which depicts the dream vision of the poem, ‘deep below’ the surface lilies of life, offers a rapturous erotic union of the two lovers below the bar of the epigraph caption, and makes material what Dante Gabriel Rossetti alludes to metaphorically. Charles Ricketts’s illustration makes visible in order to magnify what the poem only briefly alludes to: the ‘sudden ripple’ that ‘made the faces flow / One moment joined, to vanish out of reach’. Although the lovers part at the end of the poem, the illustrative design holds in balance the upper, dark half of yearning and the lower, lighter bottom half of erotic union, when

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the hair of the lovers becomes the ripples of the water under which they are imaginatively submerged. While division structures the sonnet, as well as the design, the graphic format of the page works to foreground the white space of the poem, and to emphasise the white space of the illustration. In the sonnet, while there is a volta with the full stop after line eight, the sestet begins with another quatrain that disrupts the usual rhythm of the Petrarchan sestet, so that this segment of the poem rhymes cddcdc. The reversal of the ‘cd’ rhyme with ‘dc’ suggests a mirror image, a rhyme repeated in the final two lines. The play with reversal, repetition and echo is also a structural principle of the illustrated page. The poem’s form is incorporated into the rhythmical format of the page. The design turns the sonnet’s conventionally restrictive space into a fluid and mobile form. The intermeshing of poem in the graphic design is also evident in other poems illustrated in The Magazine of Art, such as Lord Houghton’s ‘Easter: In Florence’ (Figs 2.5 and 2.6), in which the poem’s stanzas are set as blocks of text arranged asymmetrically on the first page, and then in two parallel columns on the second page (Houghton 1890). The scattered stanzas within the design offer the poem as a fragmented form, in tension with its regular octave composed of two regularly rhyming quatrains (abab),

Figure 2.5 Lord Houghton, ‘Easter: In Florence’, Magazine of Art, January 1890: 276.

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positioned as part of the overall layering effect of these pages. The end of the poem brings the reader straight back to ‘English ground’ (651) that is hardly aestheticist in expression: ‘Then turn the page, and seek the round / Of daily pleasures, pains, and duties: / It’s good to stand on English ground’ (277). Nonetheless, although the speaker’s injunction to ‘turn the page’ abruptly calls attention to the poem as a material object, the concluding stanza enjoins the reader to resist the loss of ‘memory’s flowers’ to time, and instead keep safe from the temporal forgetfulness ‘that Eastertide in Florence!’ Such a conclusion, for a poem published in a serial magazine, resists the ephemerality of its print media as it reminds the reader that another page follows this one, and after that another issue. The decorative design remediates the poem as less a conventional expression of Italophilia than an assertion of the aesthetic space of the magazine, remaking poems as graphic forms that resist the transience of the magazine.3 Charles Ricketts’s designs for two other poems published together in the Magazine of Art, ‘Elizabethe Queen’ and ‘Elizabethe Prisonner’, frames both as a single compositional unit within a black border, where the poem’s intricate relation to the design is signalled by the antiquated spelling (including the long ‘s’) and the dispersal of decorative

Figure 2.6 Lord Houghton, ‘Easter: In Florence’, Magazine of Art, January 1890: 277.

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stylised roses as an ornament that interrupts the space of the poem (Queen Elizabeth I 1891a; 1891b). While Ricketts’s approach to poetry illustration visually renders the poem’s theme, his highly stylised mise en page also defamiliarises the poem as artificial, ornamental and subservient to the visual field. Experiments with decorative poetics are also a remarkable feature of the monthly magazine for the ‘new girl’, Atalanta. As the earlier example of Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ indicates, part of the periodical codes of Atalanta was the intricate and innovative relationship between poem and visual field that embeds poetic form within the page design. This is particularly true in a striking example from the December 1888 issue, which published Ricketts’s illustration of ‘The Christmas Fleet’ by ‘Blue Jay’, the pseudonym of Lady Jane Maria Strachey (1840–1928), suffragette and the mother of Lytton Strachey (Figs 2.7 and 2.8). This four-stanza poem describes Christmas ships bearing children’s gifts, and plays on its associations with the traditional

Figure 2.7 ‘Blue Jay’ (Lady Jane Maria Strachey), ‘The Christmas Fleet’, Atalanta, December 1888: 218.

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English carol ‘I saw three ships (come sailing in)’ (‘Blue Jay’ 1888). Ricketts’s illustrative design for Blue Jay’s version of the carol places each stanza in a sail-like decorative space that is embedded within the wintry sea and landscape of the poem. The stanzas are an integral part of the illustration, and their place within the decorative, scroll-like sails suggest the poem is itself an art form, a visual object, that is distinguished from the visual image and yet also a part of the design. This double status of the poem is underscored by the word ‘brings’ in the penultimate stanza, which lies outside the bounded space of the poem, breaking the design and yet also underscoring the poem’s constructed artifice in this illustration. The stanzas carry (or ‘bring’) the Christmas message to the children in the poem, and their vehicle – the boat’s decorative, scrolllike sail – is apt as the poem’s framing space. Words in periodical poetry move, in this poem-as-sail visual metaphor, towards the reader of the magazine. As with periodical poems that are date-stamped by season of the issue in which they appear, the ships

Figure 2.8 ‘Blue Jay’ (Lady Jane Maria Strachey), ‘The Christmas Fleet’, Atalanta, December 1888: 219.

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come ‘a-sailing’ and ‘a-sparkle[ling]’ because it is Christmas, the moment ‘When all our ships come home’. The words move like a cargo of gifts for the reader – citing other popular middle-class magazines that overtly figure their poems as freight, such as the Argosy (byline ‘laden with golden grain’) and Good Words (both published by Alexander Strahan). ‘The Christmas Fleet’ signifies metatextually the magazine’s seasonal gifts: poems that are decorative, memorable and ephemeral. As much as the visual treatment of Blue Jay’s poem signifies the aesthetic importance of the magazine poem as a trope for the serial’s overall dance between cultural value and temporal fleetingness, the poem also signifies the non-representational function of the fin-de-siècle magazine. While the poem is incorporated into Ricketts’s design as part of the ship’s sails, the placement of the word ‘brings’ outside the space given to its stanza, in the space between sails that is also occupied by cherubic heads, is a reminder of the supremacy of the graphic over the lexical. As that word ‘brings’ gestures to the power of the poem to carry the symbolic burden of the magazine to the reader, that word’s displacement within the mise en page also breaks any claim to the representational. Rather, the decorated poem is supremely stylised, artificial and two-dimensional, bringing visual delight but not mimesis, offering words as gifts that can be cast out into white space at the service of the design. While this stray word is an unusual example of the triumph of artist over poet, its displacement discloses poetic form’s rendering as visual space, not a lexical container, into which the supremacy of the visual design can even be pressed at the expense of stanzaic integrity. This is the metaphorical ship that, as the poem’s refrain has it, ‘comes in’. Most definitions of literary form stop at the limits of the poem’s words, despite criticism’s recent turn to ‘cultural neo-formalism’ in which form is of course fundamental. Susan Wolfson’s entry on the term in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics points out the difficulty of defining form, because it is an ‘unstable referent’, an ‘ideal abstraction’ and also ‘a material appearance or shape’, as the Latin root forma conveys (Wolfson 2012: 497). The materiality of poetic form was often signified by poetic experimentation, and as E. Warwick Slinn argues, Victorian poetry’s emphasis on the combination of material reality, cultural formation and subjective experience was a reaction against the ‘essentialist assumptions of organic poetics’ (Slinn 2000: 52). Angela Leighton underlines the slipperiness of the term for late Victorian poets in particular, encoding ‘a new and specific sense of bodily presence’, beauty’s desirable form as well as formal artistry (Leighton 2007: 9). As Leighton adds, ‘both a container and a deflector’, form captures what is both within and without, ‘the shape it keeps and the shape it keeps out’ (16). The magazine experiment with poetic form renders visible what was embedded in notions of form all along. Poetic form encodes its own contingent limitations, and has a dialogic relationship both within a single issue and also in a rhythmical patterning across issues. Poetic form, the magazine poems suggest, is an intricate mixing of verbal and visual intratextual, extratextual and intertextual fields. The limitations of conventional taxonomies of literary form are most obvious when magazine poems playfully visualise the boundaries and constraints of form: both the formal limitations of the poem and the limitations of form itself. The experimental illustrated poetry in Atalanta is emblematic of the late-century challenge to the bounded borderlines of poetic form, the limits that we normally understand by form’s designation as the textual container for the poem’s words – what Wolfson terms ‘the multiple systems that shape as well as convey information’ (2012: 497). If form is shape and appearance, illustrated poetry enfolds the verbal text as part of the visual

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text. The verbal-visual dynamics of the periodical poem, itself embedded within a larger culture within and without the periodical’s ‘visual effects’, challenge the taxonomy of poetic form as a purely textual container. The illustrated poems from late nineteenth-century magazine culture not only suggest the limits of form, they playfully figure the poem’s limits as part of their design. Formal experimentation in the middle-class magazine Atalanta is particularly significant because of the magazine’s socio-political agenda. This sixpenny monthly, which ran from 1887 to 1898, and was edited by L. T. Meade, challenged cultural and social gender conventions as part of its ‘ambitious’ (Mitchell 1995: 11) agenda to advance opportunities for the ‘new girl’. Meade believed, Sally Mitchell argues, that the new girl ‘needed only support and guidance in order to become women in the new pattern’ (11), and Atalanta offered that nurturing role. The advancement of female opportunities through education, and especially through literature and reading, permeated the monthly. Regular essays paired celebrated writers of the day with important authors (such as Charlotte Yonge on John Keble, and Mary Ward on Elizabeth Barrett Browning), and each issue ended with reader competitions based on writing prompts and identification of poetry passages. The ‘Atalanta Scholarship and Reading Union’ offered essays on how to read and interpret poetry (with a series on metrically correct recitation by Arthur Burrell), a regular ‘notes on books’ review section, and an essay by Amy Levy on the institutions of the British Museum Reading Room.4 The publication of poetry was an important regular feature in shaping the ‘new girls’, a fact indicated by the sheer number of poems in the magazine by well-known poets like Christina Rossetti, Katherine Tynan, A. Mary F. Robinson, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Jean Ingelow, Harriet Eleanor Hamilton King and Edith Nesbit. Poetry serves a crucial function central to the political mission of Atalanta: to educate, entertain and acculturate its young female audience, and to shape them into critical readers. The magazine’s promotion of opportunities for the ‘new girl’ was articulated within the conventions of middle-class girlhood. As Kristine Moruzi argues, Atalanta (a magazine also discussed in this volume by Alexis Easley) asserted the value of girls’ education, but also the normative role of marriage and motherhood (Moruzi 2012). The many illustrations of girls in the act of reading disclose this doubleness: reading educates, informs, improves and liberates, but it is also an appropriate feminine activity. The embedded message of emancipation through the respectable pursuit of reading is inscribed within the emblems to one of the repeated decorative banners for the ‘Atalanta Scholarship and Reading Union’ segment of the magazine: ‘beautie’, ‘courtesie’, ‘chivalrie’, ‘franchise’, ‘love’. ‘Franchise’, a hot contemporary topic, is safely bracketed by other conventional middle-class girlhood attributes as a rhetorically cautious and yet nonetheless powerful ideological message: girl readers can obtain the suffrage and still be appropriately womanly. The magazine’s poems, then, are mediated by this overall message: reading poetry is a cultural, educational and political imperative for girls, but it is also an entirely proper activity. Reading is repeatedly represented as the vehicle to new worlds of possibility, and this mission of the magazine is materialised by the ‘visual effects’ of the illustrated poetry that overtly figure formal limits of a poem in order to suggest their playful erasure. Many illustrated poems partly or fully erase distinct boundaries between poetic text and illustration.5 Such verbal-visual combinations in Atalanta suggest that the illustrated poem is a supremely graphic form, and that the illustrated poem is a graphic poem. In the later issues of the magazine the designs for poems overtly include the poem, which is framed as illustrative tableau. For example, Frederick William Rolfe’s

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‘Triolet’ embeds the poem within the illustration, using handwriting for the text, and positioning the initial capital ‘H’ as the entire left side of the illustration as the cold, snowy bedframe for the baby that symbolises the new year (Rolfe 1890).6 Here the poem as visual object cites the conventional verbal-visual layout – of a picture on one side and text on the other, with a vertical line between – in order, ironically, to highlight that fact that the poem has become wholly part of the design. When the linguistic units of the poem are embedded within the illustration, the poem’s form is translated into a visual, material field. Periodicals contain multiple genres and discursive codes that make the print an unstable medium; indeed, magazine poetry is emblematic of the unstable genre of the serial title, yet also a visual and spatial interruption of the magazine’s format. But the periodical’s genres are also forms of socio-cultural action, which this polemical magazine for girls embodies in the tangible if ephemeral pages of its monthly parts. The periodical’s experimentation with illustrated poetry presents poetic form as visible, embodied and graphic, and as intractably contingent on its politicised print context. To adapt a phrase of Leighton’s, illustrated poetry ‘catches form in the act’ (2007: 27) of materialising the poem into (and within) an image, as well as into (and within) the magazine’s ‘gender ideology’. And that ‘new girl’ gender ideology, as Mitchell argues, asserted girlhood as ‘a provisional free space’ between childhood and adulthood (1995: 3), a space that asserted ‘new ways of being, new modes of behaviour, and new attitudes that were not yet acceptable for adult women’ (3). And the decorative, playful beauty of the visual field of the poem also ironically signifies for the ‘new girl’ readers the importance of good form in another sense too: the sense of physical comeliness as the proper form of middle-class femininity. After all, the title image for the magazine depicts the origin of the Greek myth, where Atalanta runs first in a race, placed in front of the streaming banner that holds the magazine’s title. Atalanta’s future husband Hippomenes might be in hot pursuit of her in this illustration, but she has not yet picked up one of the tempting golden apples he throws as a distraction to win his marital prize. The implication is that the magazine embodies this moment when Hippomenes is placed behind the banner and Atalanta is out in front. But this is a provisional, formative moment. In a magazine devoted to the inculcation into young girls of the new opportunities of late Victorian society, within dominant middle-class domestic gender conventions, form matters; and, indeed, the matter of form is embodied within poetry’s interruption of, and intervention in, the social and gender ideology of the magazine.

Typographical Poetics Other fin-de-siècle magazines reacted, however, against this effusively decorative poetics, and placed poems in quite different socio-cultural frames. The little-studied yet important The Century Guild Hobby Horse, published as an organ of the Century Guild of Artists, was a carefully designed quarterly deeply influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement that overtly displayed its debt to Pre-Raphaelitism through, for example, its contributions on Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The 1884 magazine prototype announces it will offer something ‘sufficiently different from its contemporaries to justify its publication’ and that gives ‘permanent value’: the ‘strong advocacy of subjective art in all branches’, ‘the spirit of independence’ of the contents, and the ‘sympathetic appeal from artists to the artistic world’ (Mackmurdo 1884: 12–13). The inside cover of the following issue declared: ‘[e]very care will be taken to ensure the Artistic character of the Periodical by maintaining Originality of Thought and by making Thorough all workmanship involved in its production’.7 To match its investment in art, issues were wrapped in a decorative, stylised

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cover, and contained ornaments (such as the repeated back cover device), tailpieces and headpieces, frontispieces and full-page illustrations, high-quality paper, generous margins and antiquated typography (Brooker and Thacker 2009: 71). Advertisements, all related to art and design, were scarce. Although critics have claimed, as Isobel Hurst mentions, that this title was the first to offer a literary magazine as an aesthetic experience, in contrast to earlier mass-produced serials, the aestheticism of the Hobby Horse nonetheless relates to the totalising aesthetic of earlier magazines like Atalanta, Magazine of Art and Woman’s World. The Hobby Horse was distinctive, however, for the luxury of its production, which was in tension with the ephemerality of serial print (see Brooker and Thacker 2009: 72). Scarcity was part of the magazine’s periodical signature, exemplified by the second issue for April 1886 that advertised a limited supply of proofs of the frontispiece for sale, mounted on handmade paper.8 The circulation of The Century Guild Hobby Horse was under 500, in comparison to the much higher numbers of earlier related titles (Brooker and Thacker 2009: 72, n.17).9 The magazine’s promotion of the harmonious unity of the arts was underscored by the promotion of illustrations by Blake (such as the Blake facsimile in the July 1887 issue) as an implicit inter-artistic aesthetic precursor. The inclusion of Blake signals the magazine’s debt to the Pre-Raphaelite artists who recovered and promoted Blake’s work, and the influence of Blake’s designs for illustrated poems that incorporate the poetry into a visual field. As the magazine’s first issue declared, difference in a crowded market creates value. Within the elaborately designed medieval front cover of each issue, the contents were presented with a restraint that offers a contrast to the highly detailed illustrations of other

Figure 2.9 Selwyn Image, ‘A Christmas Carol’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January 1886: 3.

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magazines. In particular, the poems are notable for their stark placement on the page and their wide margins, often with a facing blank page. The poems were not illustrated in the conventional sense, by twinning the poem with a directly related visual image such that both make up compositional units of several on a page, but were embedded in the graphic unitary space of the issue that privileged the artist and the designer. As the lecture by G. F. Watts put it, reproduced in the magazine for January 1890, art is not an embellishment but integral to national dignity: ‘[w]e want more intellectual demand made upon our artists’ (Watts 1890: 10). The attention given to decorative arts is underscored by the contents pages of this annual volume of the magazine, which lists illustrations before poems and essays, reversing the usual priority in periodicals. This visual field of poetry is highlighted by the frequent placement of poems around blank pages, empty of letterpress or of illustration. For example, John Addington Symonds’s ‘Ave Imperatrix’ (Symonds 1890) is printed on the verso opposite a blank page, following a striking full-page tinted facsimile on brown paper of Frederick Leighton’s studies for the picture The Captive Andromache (completed in 1888) that, according to the contents page, faces page 1, and yet is separated from it by two sides of a blank page. The page following Symonds’s poem is the beginning of G. F. Watts’s essay on ‘The National Position of Art’. The primacy of the visual field in the magazine gives poems and full-page illustrations the same graphic space and the same importance to the overall aesthetics. While the poems are presented as lexical space, therefore, they are also visual spaces, framed by an expanse of thick, handmade paper. A few poems in the Hobby Horse were directly illustrated on the same page, especially in the earlier issues. The first poem, which runs over two pages in the inaugural issue for January 1886, illustrates Selwyn Image's 'A Christmas Carol' (Figs 2.9, 2.10)

Figure 2.10 Selwyn Image, ‘A Christmas Carol’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January 1886: 4.

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Figure 2.11 Antony Burgess, ‘The Lady of the Rains’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January 1886: 3. with a headpiece containing four circular vignettes of heads in a Pre-Raphaelite style, placed opposite (and in implicit dialogue with) the frontispiece of Antony Burgess’s ‘The Lady of the Rains’ (Fig. 2.11). This decorative design parallels the narrow space of the poem with the narrow figure of the Virgin Mary in Burgess’s illustration, heightened by the vertical line down the centre of the gown. The narrow column of letterpress highlights the poem’s sestina structure that rhymes ababcc (with cc as the refrain repeated through the poem and expanded in the final stanza) and has an extra metrical foot in lines two and three. The narrowness of the text is enhanced by the typeface, which privileges height over width, as well as antiquity over modernity. Image’s poem is part of what Julie Codell terms the Hobby Horse’s explicit ‘anti-representational view on art’, largely producing a geometrical and linear two-dimensionality, in which the magazine promoted unity of text and image throughout, particularly privileging design, defined as ‘a term for the abstract, formal arrangement of a work of art’ that ‘devalued decoration and ornamentation’ (Codell 1983: 44, 47). Each page of the magazine was printed as one compositional unit, what the editor of the prototype issue, A. H. Mackmurdo, termed (in his essay on the magazine) an anti-mechanistic unity in separate parts, ‘a tapestry of some connected texture and harmonious design’ of ‘interwoven personalities’ (1884: 3). Mackmurdo also asserts the primacy of abstract imaginative

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art over representational naturalistic art, defining the significance of illustration as ‘a pure creation . . . to express combination and re-presentation’ (7). There will, he continues, be no attempt merely to juxtapose picture with idea: [f]or the brain that conceived this picture-poem, or poem-picture, conceived firstly the idea, or spirit of this flesh, and going into the world, sought certain things for symbols of expression, and, combining them, re-presented the idea – henceforth a new creature in the likeness of its creator. (7–8) In this ‘subjective art’, poem and picture become together ‘re-presented’ and re-created. In this recreation, letterpress and illustration are one unity that reimagines both. Consequently, poetic form is reimagined as abstract two-dimensional design, and letterpress re-created as part of the graphic unity of the page, where antiquated typographical design replicates the non-representational space of the poem. In Hobby Horse, poetic form is a typographical space. The magazine issues underlined the importance of typography to the visual design of the page by including fewer and fewer ornamental devices and adjacent frontispieces. Some poems, especially in the earlier issues, have decorative initial capitals.10 But the poems are typically presented with no overtly related illustration or ornament, and are singled out for bold placement. The editor Herbert P. Horne’s ‘A Song’ in the first issue relates the place of poetry to ephemerality and value: Be not too quick to carve our rhyme And hearts upon the trunk of Time, Lest one swift year prove in its run They were but lines and poorly done. That longest lives which surely grows In stillness and by sure degrees: So rest you, sweet; That going hence with calmer feet We may be friends when friends are foes, And old days merely histories. (Horne 1886a) This poem starts with two conventionally iambic couplets that implicitly compare the magazine’s poems with a poem engraved on a tree trunk, and warns that only time will tell if the ‘run’ proves the ‘lines’ well made. Then, in the final six lines, which offer an envelope rhyme scheme cdeecd, the poem suggests that longevity offers value, especially longevity based on the oxymoronic phrase ‘stillness and by sure degrees’ or, in other words, slow increments that are the opposite of the mechanised world of mass serial print. The lines carved on the tree are the lines of a poem, but also the lines of a linear graphic design aesthetic. In other words, the magazine’s design slows time by rendering the page abstract and, in Linda Dowling’s words, ‘densely integrated’ and ‘inaccessible’, with a typography ‘intent upon resisting what we may call the mechanistic consumption of the page by the eye’ (1986: 126). Arthur Galton’s poem ‘To the Century Guild’ compares the ‘mystic page’ of Spenser’s Faery Queene, in which knights battle ‘for her, her cause and crown’, to the pages of the Hobby Horse, in which ‘Art is our Queen, for whom stern war we wage / Against

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all those who dare to tread her down’ (Galton 1886). This Petrarchan sonnet implicitly identifies the medieval knight on the cover of the monthly parts as going into battle for art, against those that ‘traffic her for gold’. In contrast, the ‘loyal Knights’ of the Century Guild ‘are come to make her free, / They fight until her banner floats on high.’ In contrast to the knight’s steed, the magazine is the metaphorical horse on which the contributors do battle for art, the ‘hobby horse’ in particular signifying a small horse or pony (the etymology of ‘hobby’) as well as a pastime and a children’s toy, and also a feature of a medieval morris dance. This title is playful as well as deeply serious. The magazine is the ‘hobby horse’ that goes into chivalric battle for the association of artists and designers known as the Century Guild, experimenting with an ephemeral magazine as a serious decorative art form while championing the primacy and permanency of art. Thus, the design of the Hobby Horse, and especially its typographical poetics, embraced but also vigorously resisted the magazine format’s periodicity and disposability. The typeface adds to this effect. The Hobby Horse adopts a typeface which remediates the poem as antiquated and valuable: Caslon Old Face, as William Peterson argues, signified antiquated English book tradition, or what he terms ‘period typography’ (Peterson 1991: 26), and was a favourite of Hobby Horse publishers the Chiswick Press, whose revival of the type in the mid-nineteenth century influenced William Morris’s type design for his commercial books. The Hobby Horse adoption of the font unifies the issues in their alignment with this antique book tradition and the Arts and Crafts Movement revival of pre-industrial book arts. The large format of the Hobby Horse, with wide margins around the poem and empty pages surrounding it, both separate the poem from the rest of the magazine and embed it typographically as part of an older print media. The poem’s typography is its visual remediation, a material embodiment of old book arts that connects the predominantly contemporary poems in the magazine to the pre-mechanised book. While other periodical codes are embedded in the Hobby Horse poetry, the poem’s visual field is predominantly the typography, and the typographical design renders the poetic form as at the same time lexical and also self-consciously visual and material. Dowling terms this doubling the ‘typographical effects’ that were essential to the decorative treatment of literature in 1890s magazines that promoted the primacy of the graphic artist (Dowling 1986: 117). While there was a structural tension throughout 1890s magazines between the graphic and the literary, nonetheless, Dowling contends, ‘the letterpress itself becomes in a sense pictorial’ as blocks of text are treated like ‘an essentially decorative element, and to that degree as an opaquely formal rather than transparently apprehensible entity’ (121). As Frankel argues, 1890s book art placed the stylised surface as primary, as opposed to the earlier emphasis on the capacity of the surface to explicate content. In contrast to the expressivity of the earlier Victorian period, Frankel contends, the fin-de-siècle book had no depth. Frankel’s focus here is Wilde’s aesthetics, but nonetheless his argument also applies more generally to magazine poems, in which art asserts its ‘material existence’ as the ‘self-conscious concern for the artistic medium as constitutive of the work’s larger meanings’ (Frankel 2009: 18, 21). Building on these approaches, I argue that the typographically antiquated poems of this period offer the text as ornament, and poetic form as a graphic, material surface rather than a representational depth. The magazine poems are thus isolated in graphic design, highlighted as decorative ornament, and also embedded within the overall aesthetics of the magazine. As Dowling comments, the typography of Caslon Old Face signifies an anti-commercial ‘deliberate and principled

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reaction or anachronism’ (1986: 124). While the entire magazine was set in this type, the poems’ graphic design as a block of type, contrasting starkly with the surrounding white space, accentuates the typography as such an overt remediation of the poem that the poem is no longer expressive. For Dowling, this aesthetic creates ‘a densely integrated although not an easily accessible page’ (126), an overt ‘typographical resistance’ to leisured reading that also commodifies the visual object of the page (126–7). Although Dowling does not single out poetry, there are important consequences for the place of poetry in magazines as well as the reinvention of poetic form. Poetry is where the resistance to reading is most prevalent in the magazine, and the rendering of textual form into a typographical surface, set within wide margins and printed on expensive paper, offers the whole magazine as old-fashioned and pre-mechanical while also presenting the poems as a mannered, awkward and overdetermined ornamental form where surface style is primary, rather than semantic meaning. Later magazines integral to the development and dissemination of poetry in the 1890s continued the experimentation with the poetic form as graphic design. The quarterly The Yellow Book perpetuated the anti-representational design of The Century Guild Hobby Horse, adopting the same old-face typography, making the image primary over the text, and rendering the poems visually awkward with the use of catchwords. Edited by Henry Harland, The Yellow Book was associated with avant-garde writers and artists like Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert, Richard Le Gallienne and Rosamund Mariott Watson. Presenting its format self-consciously, The Yellow Book prospectus declared itself to be an ‘Illustrated Magazine which shall be beautiful as a piece of bookmaking’, but which would also be ‘a book in form, a book in substance; a book beautiful to see and convenient to handle’, with its hard-board covers, highvalue production and steep price of 5 shillings per issue. But The Yellow Book was also not really like a typical book either, something indicated by its provocative title, which refers to the yellow-backed decadent French novels of the period. The experimental, luxurious keepsake signalled its modernity, rejecting the mechanisation of mass market print in favour of experimental format and content. Like many magazines of the nineties, as Brooker and Thacker argue, The Yellow Book was ‘simultaneously resistant to commercial philistinism’ and yet ‘complicit’ in marketing itself ‘as high-quality commodities’ (Brooker and Thacker 2009: 73). Although The Yellow Book aligned itself in contrast to other periodicals, which it deemed ephemeral and low-brow, this positioning elides the magazine’s debt to precursor aestheticist magazines that experimented with illustrations to poems which resulted in a newly stylised poetry. Like these earlier magazines, The Yellow Book made poetry subsidiary to graphic design, forgoing direct pictorial illustration in favour of an abstract typographical aesthetic. Another serial, which has garnered less attention than The Yellow Book, the annual one-guinea gift book Pageant (1896–7), was edited by Ricketts’s partner Charles Shannon, together with J. W. Gleeson White (Corbett 2009: 114). The Pageant presented a homogeneous and archaic unified aesthetic. Each volume has a cover that placed the title and date at the very top, with six repeated decorative bird motifs along the edge in gold, which had the effect of emphasising the date-stamped serial’s appearance as like a book. The volume’s affinity with earlier 1890s magazines was suggested by the separate page for each poem, generous footer margins, infrequent frontispiece illustration and the occasional typographical ornament.11 Contents were divided between Literary Contents and Art Contents, and the poets included figures

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closely associated with 1890s aestheticism and decadence, such as T. Sturge Moore, Ernest Dowson, John Gray, Rosamund Marriott Watson and Michael Field. In contrast, The Dome (1897–1900), issued in multiple formats, was more commercial and eclectic in contents than the other magazines this chapter considers, and it had ‘no patience with the self-importance or pretentiousness of decadent periodicals’ such as The Yellow Book and the Pageant (Corbett 2009: 115). The Dome, inexpensively priced at one shilling, offered heterogeneity rather than unity of content and design, and aimed for a wider readership than predecessor magazines to counter what it perceived as the small, elite audience for art, design and literature. The range of its poet contributors was wider, too, than the coterie magazine publications on the market. As Corbett terms it, where some magazines reached inwards, to a small coterie reading public, The Dome reached outward, even if its sense of an audience was still ‘opaque’ (116–17). The Dome presented its poetry on separate pages from other contents, but with narrower margins and a modern-face typography. While the magazine emphasised the importance of the visual arts, with its separate sections for architecture, literature, visual arts and music (and occasionally a section on sculpture), its design was not as homogeneous as the Pageant, The Yellow Book, The Century Guild Hobby Horse or Woman’s World. And yet, despite The Dome’s broad commercial appeal, the magazine still resisted the miscellaneous, profusive and elaborate ‘periodical codes’ represented by the earlier commercial successes of Atalanta and The Magazine of Art. The poetry, with each poem presented with the same layout and typography, and occupying a separate page, was, once again, offered as a synecdoche for the visual coherence which marked out the title as a whole. The mise en page displays poetry in the same way across the magazine issues and through the different formats, offering a graphic rhythm that unifies the different poetic forms through design. The signature of this magazine, its particular style, personality and contents, cohere through the mise en page, and the poems most overtly offer this iterative feature. Even this title, aspiring to a greater commercial appeal, relied on a graphic design that shared features with rival 1890s magazines. The inclusion of poetry in magazines at the end of the nineteenth century represents an attempt by the titles to build a coherence or unity of graphic arts and a distinctive audience. The place of the poem in an overdetermined, illustrated, decorated and typographically distinctive mise en page embeds the poem’s formal literary codes in the periodical codes of the serial. The poetics of periodical poetry in the 1890s is therefore contingent on such poetry’s graphic treatment in its print context. In the long rivalry between letterpress and art, which the 1890s magazines attempted decisively to overturn by claiming the supremacy of the visual over the text, poetic form is rendered visible, material and graphic. The publishing practices of magazine poetry remediated poetic form within the mise en page, and challenged the representational claims of the form of earlier Victorian poems, even in poems from an earlier era co-opted for this purpose. The anti-mechanised approach to magazine publishing, even apparent in the design of more commercial titles like The Dome, makes poetry new by presenting it as an abstract, two-dimensional design space, occluding any claims in the poem to depth and expressivity. Wilde’s playful sense of the importance, if not supremacy, of ‘good form’ captures the materiality of the poem on the magazine page beyond its linguistic codes, to situate poetic form as contingent upon, intrinsic to and making visible within, a social culture of shared periodical codes.

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Acknowledgement I am grateful to the librarians in Special Collections, University of Victoria, for their assistance with research for this chapter. Poems from Woman’s World, The Yellow Book, Atalanta and Pageant are indexed as part of the Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry, edited by Alison Chapman (http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet/).

Notes 1. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Walter Crane gives Beatrice’s birth date as 1873. 2. The contents page of Good Words for 1868 gives Dalziel as the illustrator; in fact, he was the engraver. 3. The poem was republished in Houghton’s 1893 Stray Verses, 1889–1890. 4. See Burrell (1890) and Levy (1889). 5. For example, see Pratt (1887) and Bates (1888). 6. For similar examples, see Hebert (1892) and Milford (1892), both illustrated by A. L. Bowley. 7. See the inside cover, The Century Guild Hobby Horse, January 1886. 8. See the slip opposite the contents page of No. 2, April 1886. The frontispiece in question was Ford Madox Brown’s The Entombment, which accompanied William Michael Rossetti’s essay on the artist. 9. For example, according to the Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800–1900, the Magazine of Art had a circulation of 2,000 in 1881. 10. For example, Horne (1886b). 11. See, for example, the acorn ornament that separates each stanza in Hemingway (1896).

Works Cited Alkalay-Gut, K. (2000), ‘Aesthetic and Decadent Poetry’, in J. Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 228–54. Armstrong, I. (1993), Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, London: Routledge. Bates, C. D. (1888), ‘The Crow and the Fox’, Atalanta, April: 380–5. ‘Blue Jay’ (1888), ‘The Christmas Fleet’, Atalanta, December: 218–19. Brooker, P. and A. Thacker (2009), ‘General Introduction’, in P. Brooker and A. Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–26. Brooks, M. (1970), ‘Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the Book’, Criticism, 12. 4: 301–15. Burrell, A. (1890), ‘Voices from My Books’, Atalanta, October: 13–17. Claes, K. and M. Demoor (2010), ‘The Little Magazine in the 1890s: Towards a “Total Work of Art” ’, English Studies, 91. 2: 133–49. Codell, J. F. (1983), ‘The Century Guild Hobby Horse 1884–1894’, Victorians Periodical Review, 16. 2: 43–53. Corbett, D. P. (2009), ‘Symbolism in British “Little Magazines” ’, in P. Brooker and A. Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 101–19. Crane, B. (1888), ‘Legend of the Blush Roses’, Woman’s World, February: 177. Crane, W. (1892), Claims of Decorative Art, London: Lawrence and Bullen. Dowling, L. (1986), ‘Letterpress and Picture in the Literary Periodicals of the 1890s’, Yearbook of English Studies, 16: 117–31.

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Frankel, N. (2009), Masking the Text: Essays on Literature and Mediation in the 1890s, High Wycombe: Rivendale Press. Galton, A. (1886), ‘To the Century Guild’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, July: 87. Harrison, A. H. (ed.) (2004), The Letters of Christina Rossetti, vol. 4, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Hebert, R. (1892), ‘May’, Atalanta, May: 466. Hemingway, P. (1896), ‘Four Quatrains’, Pageant, 1: 130. Horne, H. P. (1886a), ‘A Song’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January: 6. Horne, H. P. (1886b), ‘Three Songs’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January: 46–7. Houghton, R. (1893), Stray Verses, 1889–1890, London: John Murray. Houghton, R. (1890), ‘Easter: In Florence’, Magazine of Art, January: 276–7. Hughes, L. K. (2010), ‘Inventing Poetry and Pictorialism in Once a Week: A Magazine of Visual Effects’, Victorian Poetry, 48. 1: 41–72. Image, S. (1886), ‘A Christmas Carol’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January: 3–4. Kooistra, L. J. (2002), ‘Poetry and Illustration’, in R. Cronin, A. Chapman and A. H. Harrison (eds), A Companion to Victorian Poetry, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 392–418. Kooistra, L. J. (1995), The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books, Aldershot: Scolar Press. Leighton, A. (2007), On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levy, A. (1889), ‘Readers at the British Museum’, Atalanta, April: 449–54. Mackmurdo, A. H. (1884), ‘The Guild’s Flag Unfurling’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, April: 12–13. Milford, M. R. (1892), ‘Summer’, Atalanta, September: 725. Mitchell, S. (1995), The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England 1880–1915, New York: Columbia University Press. Moruzi, K. (2012), Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915, London: Routledge. Peterson, W. S. (1991), The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure, Berkeley: University of California Press. Pratt, C. S. (1887), ‘The Drummer Boy of Kent’, Atalanta, December: 146–8. Queen Elizabeth I (1891a), ‘Elizabethe Queen’, Magazine of Art, January: 383 Queen Elizabeth I (1891b), ‘Elizabethe Prisonner’, Magazine of Art, January: 384–5. Rolfe, F. W. (1890), ‘Triolet’, Atalanta, January: 221. Rossetti, C. (1904), The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed. W. M. Rossetti, London: Macmillan. Rossetti C. (1893), Goblin Market, London: Macmillan. Rossetti, C. (1890), ‘An Echo from Willowwood’, Magazine of Art, January: 385. Rossetti, C. (1887), ‘A Christmas Carol’, Atalanta, December: 154. Slinn, E. W. (2000), ‘Experimental Form in Victorian Poetry’, in J. Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 46–66. Symonds, J. A. (1890), ‘Ave Imperatrix’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January: 1. Tennyson, A. (1868), ‘1865–1866’, Good Words, 1 March: 144. Unsigned (1894), ‘Prospectus’, Yellow Book, April: front matter. Watts, G. F. (1890), ‘The National Position of Art’, Century Guild Hobby Horse, January: 2–10. Wilde, O. (1891), ‘The Critic as Artist’, in O. Wilde, Intentions, Leipzig: Heinemann and Balestier, pp. 79–175 Wolfson, S. J. (2012), ‘Form’, in A. Preminger et al. (eds), New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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3 Curious Intricacies: Some Versions of City Writing at the Fin de Siècle Nick Freeman

London, let me tell you . . . does not lie open and undefended; it is a fortified place, fossed and double-moated with curious intricacies. As must always happen in large towns, the conditions of life have become hugely artificial; no simple palisade is run up to oppose the man or woman who would take the place by storm, but serried lines of subtle contrivances, mines, and pitfalls, which it needs a strange skill to overcome. You, in your simplicity, fancied you had only to shout for these walls to sink into nothingness, but the time is gone for such startling victories as these. Arthur Machen, The Three Impostors (Machen 1995: 49) It does not matter which way we put it: the experience of the city is the fictional method; or the fictional method is the experience of the city. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Williams 1975: 191)

‘A Cloud of Humming Presences’: Urban Perceptions

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n 22 June 1903 Henry James met with representatives from Macmillan and Company to sign a contract for a book about the English capital. Twenty years before, he had argued with Walter Besant about the development of fiction, a dispute from which he had emerged victorious. Now though, he was very much on Besant’s home turf, for Besant was probably the pre-eminent historian of London during the late nineteenth century, publishing works on its medieval, Tudor and eighteenth-century incarnations as well as the wide-ranging The History of London (1893) and studies of individual districts. His grand plan for a historical and topographical survey of the city was unfinished when he died in 1901, but it had begun to be published the following year, and would emerge in ten volumes over the ensuing decade, alongside a number of offcuts, reprints and other metropolitan writings. In 1903 alone, Besant’s publishers issued The Thames, Kensington and East London – solid works in every sense, bound in black buckram and an imposing presence on any library’s shelves. Just as in the debate concerning ‘the art of fiction’ in 1884, James had no intention of following Besant’s lead, even if the older writer’s approach ensured critical respect and steady sales. The encyclopaedic held no appeal for James, and he proposed instead

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‘London Town’. According to his friend Edmund Gosse, this would be ‘a romanticpsychological-pictorial “social” London’ which would blend evocation with analysis in the course of its 150,000 words and ‘circle concentrically to the City and the suburbs’ (Gosse 1922: 60).1 An advance of £1,000, the largest James had ever been offered, would be payable on completion of the manuscript, and the royalty payment would be 20 per cent, generous terms which said much for Macmillan’s confidence in the book. Such optimism was, however, misplaced. ‘London Town’ was destined to be a frustratingly inconclusive journey into the metropolis, and James’s London consequently exists not as a single work of reference but as a composite, assembled over many years like the city itself, from a variety of fragments and scattered experiences. As the novelist would discover (or perhaps already suspected), London was not the monumental and static subject implied by Macmillan’s contract, but an elusive amalgam of his own perceptions and wider historical and cultural accretion. In proposing a London book, James was poised to enter a crowded market in which his colloquial title was commonplace: Lionel Johnson published his poem ‘London Town’ in 1891, Arthur Morrison’s novel In London Town had appeared in 1899, and while James was working on the project, Edric Vrendenburg’s London Town (1905) and Frank Berkeley Smith’s In London Town (1906) made his idea seem increasingly shop-worn. The 1890s and 1900s saw a plethora of books about the English capital, many of which were either straightforward, commercially motivated guidebooks detailing the city’s treasures and pleasures, or else took the form of more personal tours in the company of urbane men of letters, such as E. V. Lucas, who could direct visitors to the National Gallery, indicate their favourite paintings, and share anecdotes which bolstered their authority as well as providing local colour. Lucas’s A Wanderer in London (1906), a masterpiece of easy omniscience, went through twenty-eight editions over the next quarter of a century. As the largest metropolis on earth, London was a site of fascination for its inhabitants as well as visitors, and it attracted significantly greater artistic and literary attention than anywhere else in the British Isles. The rapidly growing cities of the Industrial Revolution – Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Glasgow and Belfast – soon had impressive civic buildings and parliamentary influence, but where fiction, poetry and painting were concerned, they were often overshadowed by the capital. The conception of London’s vast and complex multiplicity represented an intellectual and imaginative challenge, which no writer with pretensions to being ‘modern’ could afford to resist. Once they ventured beyond recommending hotels or detailing omnibus routes, authors were forced to devise strategies of representation which could at once transform the city of lived experience into art, and justify the practices and prejudices of that transformation in explaining the difference between ‘their’ London and those of the millions of Londoners who lived in their own versions of the capital. One radical approach to this dilemma was for writers to detach themselves from a tourist-oriented path in order to venture off the beaten track, and evoke their favourite haunts and their responses to them. This tactic foregrounded subjective encounters with the metropolis and could seem, if handled crudely, opinionated or self-indulgent. James’s adjectival cluster sought to operate between two extremes: the stolid factuality of Besant and the more speculative approach adopted in many of his own travel essays, or works such as John Davidson’s A Random Itinerary (1894), in which ‘the author’

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and ‘the imaginary disputant’ went on a series of walks in and around London and argued about what they saw. It would not be an easy course to steer. ‘London Town’ was never completed. In truth, it was never properly begun. One reason for this inertia was that James was distracted by other projects, notably his final return to his homeland, the writing of The American Scene (1907) which it inspired, and the collaboration with the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, which produced the frontispieces for his New York Edition (1907–9) after many days of what James termed ‘pedestrian prowling’ (James 1934: 77). Distractions and sheer failure of will were, however, only partially responsible for the project’s non-appearance. Background research was also a difficulty, for simply selecting what to read from the massed ranks of books on London proved almost impossible. James made some progress with W. J. Loftie’s A History of London (1884), but he had little enthusiasm for much else. The fourteen volumes of Besant’s London writings in his library have few annotations and many uncut pages (Kimmey 1979: 68). There was a more significant methodological difficulty, one which confronted many writers during this period, and it was twofold. In ‘London’, an essay first published in 1888 but revised for English Hours (1905), James wrote: One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable – embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak? (James 1981: 18) Defining what one meant by ‘London’, a collective rather than singular noun, raised many questions of political, cultural, historical and artistic focus. This sense of plethora was well expressed by G. K. Chesterton in ‘The Blue Cross’ (1911), when an omnibus crossing the capital traverses ‘thirteen separate vulgar cities all just touching each other’ (Chesterton 1929: 15–16), and by Conan Doyle in ‘The Adventure of the Six Napoleons’ (1904), where Holmes and Watson journey to Greenwich, passing through ‘the fringe of fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, literary London, commercial London, and finally, maritime London’ (Doyle 1981: 588). If, as James argued in the 1907 preface to The Spoils of Poynton, life were ‘all inclusion and confusion’ and art were ‘all discrimination and selection’ (James 1934: 129), the city could only be represented in rarefied and partial terms, and its textuality would supplant lived experience. By 1901, Greater London had a population of 6.5 million, and had extended so far and wide that there was no longer a single vantage point from which to see all of it. ‘When a social product is so vast and various’, James wrote, ‘it may be approached on a thousand different sides, and liked and disliked for a thousand different reasons’ (James 1981: 8). No wonder Davidson’s ‘London, W.’ from ‘November’ (1905) apostrophises the metropolis as the ‘subtle city of a thousand moods’ (Davidson 1973: 167). ‘How does one make printed statements, ink on paper, into “London”?’ asks Burton Pike (Pike 1981: 10). How could this printed city ever avoid what Alan Robinson calls the ‘ineluctable subjectivity’ (Robinson 2004: 249) of its presentation? In The Princess Casamassima (1886), James had sought to address this by ‘contrasting different sections of the city with one another, thus revealing its social and cultural diversity, and marking important stages in the protagonist’s development’ (Goetsch 2015: 16), but the strategy enjoyed only qualified success, and the novel had suffered an indifferent reception.

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Two decades later, commenting on ‘the assault directly made by the great city upon an imagination quick to react’ (James 1934: 59), James remarked that the city offers the observant author so many opportunities for narrative stimulus that selection had become as important as invention. The writer moves through the metropolis ‘as with his head in a cloud of humming presences’ and risks always groaning ‘under the weight of . . . accumulations’ (60). In considering the matter of London, the writer would slowly be overwhelmed by the volume of notes he had taken and the suggestive situations he observed, making composition impossible. By 1911, James was ‘so saturated with impressions that [he couldn’t] take in new ones’ (Hyde 1969: 226). At such moments, knowledge and experience, traditionally cornerstones of the novelist’s art, became markedly disadvantageous. James had spent thirty years scrutinising London before embarking on ‘London Town’, but it was not only experienced writers who recognised the difficulties of urban representation. A character in Arnold Bennett’s first novel, A Man from the North (1898), despairingly remarks that ‘there is more character within a hundred yards of this chair than a hundred Balzacs could analyse in a hundred years’ (Bennett 1898: 102). How then were writers to respond to the challenges London posed? It is a frequent feature of fin-de-siècle literature, and of the modernist era more generally, that writers should be so self-conscious in approaching such questions, and it contrasts with the attitudes of their predecessors: in H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909), Edward Pondorevo even identifies a kind of theory of London, though ‘something more than a confusion of casual accidents’ may just be ‘no more than a process of disease’ (Wells 1994: 85). The Dickens of Bleak House (1853) had an audacity and confidence in his handling of metropolitan narrative that later writers could only envy, although their actual reactions often tended towards the patronising: George Gissing observed that ‘[s]o great a change has come over the theory and practice of fiction in the England of our times that we must needs treat of Dickens as, in many respects, antiquated’ (Gissing 1903: 63). In Bleak House (and less successfully, 1857’s Little Dorrit) Dickens conceived of London as a series of sites and associations which were connected and interconnected as the novel’s complex plot required. He used individual locales to epitomise wretchedness and destitution, as with TomAll-Alone’s, and placed the city’s mud and fog at the service of his symbolic and satirical ends. Opacity and the morass were at once literal elements of a filthy and polluted metropolis and memorable images of legal and parliamentary obfuscation. No novelist of the period 1870–1914 had the same reputation and popular following as Dickens, though, and changes in publishing practices and literary fashion made a lengthy serialised novel with complex subplots and overarching symbolic language rare indeed: as John Sutherland suggests, Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875) was perhaps the last such work to be considered canonical now (Sutherland 2009: 673). This is not to say that there was no use of coherent patterns of imagery – Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) uses recurrent references to water and drowning in its descriptions of the London streets in order to evoke a world of suffocating deceit and to foreshadow Winnie Verloc’s suicide – but it was increasingly unusual. What emerged instead was a variety of approaches to the crisis of metropolitan representation. London served as the primary laboratory for these experiments, though there were also notable instances elsewhere: Bennett’s ‘Five Towns’, Joyce’s Dublin and in some respects the Nottingham of D. H. Lawrence.2 They were also by no means confined to

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fiction, with writers such as Davidson and Arthur Symons moving between prose and poetry, exploring the possibilities of collaborating with illustrators (and even photographers, as Symons did in his ‘London: A Book of Aspects’), and drawing inspiration and ideas from a variety of artistic movements.3 At the same time as more avant-garde writers were seeking out new modes of expression, conventional popular novelists were also representing the city in strikingly diverse ways, drawing inspiration from contemporary events and, as Lynne Hapgood shows in Margins of Desire (2005), making frequent use of suburban settings. Borrowing terminology from Ruskin, Robert Stange points out that ‘[i]t was only in the nineties that, for poets, painters, and novelists, London ceased to be regarded as a noxious drain or force of devastation’ (Stange 1973: 489). Though the capital (and the city in general) were still the subjects of frequent denunciation, they were also recognised as an artistic challenge rather than a social evil, or in the case of London City Council, established in 1888, a bureaucratic one.

Mixing and Matching: Urban Methodologies As the above examples demonstrate, and as I have argued elsewhere, it was very difficult for a single technique, standpoint or artistic allegiance to represent a city successfully, and most forward-looking writers tended to fashion, deliberately or otherwise, a magpie methodology which drew on a variety of contemporary (and older) discourses.4 Davidson felt that London could only be seen by what he called ‘the unmethodical man’, the observer uncommitted to a fixed position who was therefore open and attuned to the Jamesian ‘humming presences’ (Davidson 1893: 85). Ford Madox Ford felt that writing about London required an observer whose antithetical inconsistencies mirrored those of his subject, insisting that ‘he must have an impressionability and an impersonality, a single-mindedness to see, and a power of arranging his illustrations cold-bloodedly’ (Ford 1995: 18). Even those who seemed to offer straightforward celebration or abuse constructed their positions with a set of fashionable tropes and reference points rather than offering a spontaneous response to their surroundings. When Richard Le Gallienne hymned ‘the iron lilies of the Strand’ in ‘A Ballad of London’ (Le Gallienne 1895: 26), the effusive exclamation, ‘Ah, London! London! our delight’ announced a determined exercise in ‘urban pastoral’ (Dowling 1986: 222), a mode also exploited by Symons and sundry minor poets such as Herbert Horne. Attacks on the city were equally shaped by rhetorical convention, borrowing from Evangelical writing and colonial exploration their images of Hell, Purgatory, Babylon, the Cities of the Plain and the ‘dark continent’, and using them with increasing regularity and alarm as cities became ever more crowded and divided.5 Religious imagery was especially prevalent, appealing to the devoutly Christian Margaret Oliphant in ‘The Land of Darkness’ (1887) and, with vicious irony, the atheist James Thomson in his The City of Dreadful Night (1880). As the century progressed, however, religious positions were augmented by the language of sociology and political thought. The writings of Marx, Engels and William Morris were all influential in arguing that the modern city and all that came with it were neither desirable nor inevitable, though these authors’ attitudes had greater influence than their respective literary styles. The Communist writers combined economic analysis with imagery already familiar from the gothic, notably when categorising the vampiric nature of capitalism, while Morris offered either rejection of ‘six counties overhung with smoke’ (at the beginning of The Earthly Paradise, 1870) or, in News from Nowhere

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(1891), visionary excursions into a reborn medievalism. Those denouncing the city drew far more determinedly on the work of sociologists on both sides of the Channel, allying this with something of the quasi-scientific mission of French naturalism. At the same time, sociological exactitude allowed more precise use of evidential argument, and its deployment made at times for hard-hitting critique and a strong sense of pity and sympathy for those caught in the net of poverty and circumstance. The pre-eminent chronicler of slum life during the 1880s, before his fiction began its steady movement into the shabby gentility of New Grub Street (1891), was Gissing. Much as he admired aspects of Dickens, he had a fundamentally different temperament from the older novelist, and his stoically pessimistic outlook left him unconvinced by Morris’s brand of idealism. Gissing read widely in sociological and scientific literature, noting works such as Arnold White’s The Problems of a Great City (1886) in his diary and commonplace book. His own fiction, however, was much more concerned with the wreckage of individual lives than with synoptic surveys of want or, indeed, its amelioration, and it catalogued London’s injustices and monstrosities with bitter relish. Gissing’s first novel was the voluminous three-decker Workers in the Dawn (1880). Clumsily plotted and given to melodramatic excess (as when Arthur Golding hurls himself over Niagara Falls at the book’s conclusion), it nonetheless showed his skill in dialogue and the delineation of character and environment. Successive novels quickly refined these abilities, aided by a remarkable work ethic that produced a daily output often reaching 4,000 handwritten words. By the time of The Nether World (1889), Gissing was writing about working-class life with authority and considerable dramatic power, and his accounts of the Clerkenwell slums bears comparison with the findings of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, published in successive volumes from 1889. Booth aimed to provide an inventory of London’s domestic finances, employing teams of researchers who went from door to door classifying households and thence streets and districts by colour (black was the poorest, gold the most wealthy), and itemising their living conditions and possessions as objectively as possible. Gissing had no faith in political solutions to social inequality, nor did he see it as the novelist’s responsibility to devise them, and while he shared Booth’s regard for the telling detail as an image of deprivation and despair, his aim was very different. As he confided to his diary on 1 March 1888 shortly after his estranged first wife had died in wretched circumstances, he would never cease ‘to bear testimony against the accursed social order that brings about things of this kind’ (Gissing 1978: 23). Marrying observational insight with patient research and an ability to meet tight deadlines, Gissing might have made an excellent journalist, had he not held newspapers in contempt and seen the calling of the novelist as infinitely higher than that of the hack. He, too, shows how central a hybridised methodology was to writing about cities during this period. The Nether World is, as John Goode points out, a gloomy rewriting of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), in which a man returns from Australia with a fortune determined to do good and sees the steady destruction of his hopes (Gissing 1992: xxi). Idealism and other Dickensian virtues seemingly have no place among the venal, selfish and violent denizens of Clerkenwell, Gissing feeling that Dickens’s essentially optimistic outlook was a betrayal of his writerly obligations. To this inversion of a familiar and popular story, Gissing added a great many details that were much like those in the pages of contemporary newspapers; a man is killed in a traffic accident in a busy street, a gang of forgers steals pewter tankards from public houses and melts them down

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to make counterfeit pennies, a bank holiday ‘spree’ degenerates into drunken violence, and a jealous actress hurls vitriol into the face of her rival. If this was realism, then it was a realism that was far closer to lived experience than it had been in Dickens (or, for that matter, Trollope or Eliot). Gissing was prepared to use the raw material of London life for his novels in ways which made his critics (and even his admirers) profoundly uncomfortable. His ironic and jarring juxtapositions of classical literature with proletarian earthiness in the ‘Io! Saturnalia!’ chapter of The Nether World suggested either that there was a continuum of brutality and excess that extended from ancient Rome to modern London, or that the religious festivals of the classical world had been stripped of their purpose and made an excuse for alcohol-fuelled brawls. This collision of ancient and modern, in which the contemporary is found wanting and progress scorned, would become a recurrent trope in writing about British cities, reaching its apotheosis in the audacious cultural fragmentation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922. Gissing’s fiction amalgamated elements of earlier Victorian novels, newspaper reporting, sociology and a determined attempt to broaden the confines of realist subject matter.6 He did not, however, have especially radical taste where visual art was concerned, and though he argued in an essay of 1895 that ‘The novelist works, and must work, subjectively’ (quoted in Gissing 1992: x), his fiction did not therefore make much use of the most significant artistic innovation of the late nineteenth century: impressionism.

‘Touch-and-Go Chronicles’ Impressionism was, writes Max Saunders, at once ‘a repertoire of consciously selected devices and an expression of its author’s personality’ (Saunders 1996: 442). The reason for this was its concern with the momentary and ephemeral, which prioritised fugitive perceptions and sensations over detailed and/or rationalised treatments of events. Wilde’s Lady Bracknell mourns the fact that she ‘lives in an age of surfaces’ (Wilde 1994: 409), but as her creator said in another context, ‘Only the shallow know themselves’ (1244). Impressionism skimmed the surface of life, capturing its vivacious ephemerality in ways the detailed descriptions of earlier realism could not. James had considered writing a travel book called ‘Superficial Impressions’; far from being dismissive, superficiality presented itself as a legitimate response to a teeming and otherwise unmanageable environment which offered perpetual solicitation. In 1872, Blanchard Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage had quoted Emerson – ‘We touch and go / And sip the foam of many lives’ – in advertising itself as a ‘touch-and-go chronicle’. Recognising the metropolis’s dynamic movement, the brevity of encounters and the transience of perceptions, required a mode of writing newly responsive to spontaneity. A key moment in impressionism’s application to British (rather than French) settings came in 1905, when, in The Soul of London, Ford Madox Ford described an incident he purportedly observed when his train paused on its approach to the terminus. Looking down into the streets below, he saw a woman running ‘suddenly out of a door. A man followed her hastily. He had red hair, and in his hand a long stick.’ Before anything else developed, however, the train moved on and the story was abruptly cut short. ‘I have not the least idea whether he were going to thrash her, or whether together they were going to beat a carpet’, Ford concluded (Ford 1995: 42–3). Seeing no accounts of murder in Southwark in that evening’s newspaper, Ford was unable to explain what he had seen,

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and felt that the incident prompted ‘pathos’ and ‘dissatisfaction’ because it denied ‘the sentiment ingrained in humanity of liking a story to have an end’ (43). Sherlock Holmes would have regarded this as ‘one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles’ (Doyle 1981: 245), but while he would have been at pains to rationalise and explain this occurrence (although not, perhaps, as Andrew Smith suggests elsewhere in this volume, wholly successfully), providing narrative closure and concomitant emotional satisfaction, Ford revelled in its resistance to such strategies, believing that it was more important to provide a memorable evocation of an incomplete event, one which captured its vividness and spontaneity, than to subject it to sustained analysis. Refusing to explain such incidents undermined the dominant mode of realist story-telling, unsettling readers used to trusting that all would eventually be revealed. A story without an ending forced readers to rethink the aims of their textual consumption, making the authorial handling of narrative material become more important than its raw content. Ford may have been influenced by the reader-baiting of James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ (1896), but it is also likely that, having been a young poet during the 1890s, he had watched with interest the development of impressionistic city verse in works such as W. E. Henley’s London Voluntaries and Symons’s Silhouettes (both 1892) and London Nights (1895). In these poems, and others by Wilde, Rosamond Marriott Watson, Le Gallienne, Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, Lawrence Binyon and others, the self-contained incident became of central importance. Symons’s ‘In the Train’ (1892) is a good example. In his 1924 memoir of Joseph Conrad, Ford had written that ‘Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains. We in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render impressions’ (Ford 1924: 194–5). Symons did just this. No fewer than nine poems from Silhouettes are titled ‘In – ’, the preposition being used to convey the immersive immediacy of experience: ‘In Bohemia’, ‘In Carnival’, ‘In Kensington Gardens’. ‘In the Train’, dated 2 March 1891, opens: The train through the night of the town, Through a blackness broken in twain By the sudden finger of streets; Lights, red, yellow, and brown, From curtain and window-pane, The flashing eyes of the streets. (Symons 1924: 152) There was no attempt to explain where the train was going, where it had been or who might be on it. Instead, Symons sought to convey its rapid movement through a murky world feebly illuminated with disconcerting brown light. The image of the city became geometrical, even pointillist, as the train splits the darkness in two and moves through flashes of colour, excluding both ‘narrative progression’ and the ‘finite verbs’ which ‘would impose a temporal sequence’ (Gibbons 1973: 77). The poem was not Symons’s most accomplished, but its radical implications were clear. In ‘Modernity in Verse’ (1892), he had seen the test of ‘poetry which professes to be modern’ as being ‘its capacity for dealing with London, with what one sees or might see there, indoors and out’ (Symons 1983: 233). Elsewhere he suggests that ‘the impressionist, in literature as in painting, would flash upon you in a new, sudden way so exact an image of

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what you have just seen, just as you have just seen it’, that it seems that the perception of the image and its artistic reproduction are simultaneous and indivisible (Symons 1893: 859). ‘In the Train’ exemplified this sketchy spontaneity, transplanting Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844) into metropolitan soil, and demonstrating the truth of D. S. MacColl’s definition of impressionism’s purpose as ‘to catch and render fleeting and transitory things’ (MacColl 1891: 544). Impressionism dominated city poetry throughout the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century. Probably the only significant urban poems of the fin de siècle not to employ it are Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night and the London poems of Davidson’s final collection, Fleet Street and Other Poems (1909), in which blank verse closely modelled on the poet’s earlier prose essays is predominant. Perhaps because its use was so widespread, literary impressionism did not cause the same controversy as its more famous pictorial counterpart, though an unsigned piece in 1897 in the Quarterly Review accused it of offering ‘vague mistiness substituted for realities’ (173). This is partly because it soon became more interested in the representation of consciousness and perception than in attempting to imitate visual art, and partly because there was no clear consensus on its definition. Nevertheless, impressionism’s concern with evoking the immediate without moral reflection or didactic intent would revolutionise city writing. During the 1890s and 1900s, the ‘purer’ strain of impressionism found in brief, pictorially inspired lyrics such as Wilde’s ‘Impression du Matin’ (1882), with its Whistlerian ‘The Thames nocturne of blue and gold / Changed to a Harmony in grey’ (Wilde 2000: 153), was cross-fertilised with the more familiar, detailed description characteristic of older forms of realist writing. Even before the collapse of Mudie’s in 1894, the short story and single-volume novel had been rapidly gaining ground on the three-decker, with new and established novelists alike identifying an appealing combination of greater financial reward and, importantly, artistic freedom. Gissing spent the first decade or so of his career chronicling underprivileged life in London with scrupulous if jaundiced exactitude, but after writing ‘A Victim of Circumstance’ in 1892, he began a determined campaign to market himself afresh as a writer of short stories and novellas, abandoning the three-decker after In the Year of Jubilee (1894) and enjoying far greater material rewards with briefer fictions that required far less labour to produce.7 Commercial considerations merged with technical innovations and shifts in fashion, a process which had two important consequences. The first was a reduction in the lengthy set-piece description which had been so characteristic of London writing from Bleak House to Mrs Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). The ‘sketch’ or ‘study’ became increasingly popular as old-fashioned causal narratives and web-like structural organisation gave way to new forms of representational practice. The second was a refusal to moralise, which, combined with a wider plea for what James sniffily termed in ‘The Death of the Lion’ (1894) a ‘larger latitude’ (James 1948: 29) to subject matter often deemed unsuitable for literary representation, encouraged greater frankness and, indeed, attention to topics previously taboo. This would lead in time to the iconoclasm of Dubliners (1914). Although that text, peopled with such characters as ‘the queer old josser’ (Joyce 2000: 16) who seemingly exposes himself to the schoolboys in ‘An Encounter’ was still some years away, fiction was becoming increasingly frank in addressing the difference between what could be seen on the streets and what the constraints of the publishing industry made permissible in print.

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In Hubert Crackanthorpe’s ‘The Struggle for Life’ (1893), the Darwinian language which was such a feature of naturalism collides with sociological journalism and impressionistic evocation in a frank account of a working-class woman in an abusive marriage whose poverty forces her into sexual commerce. The frankness of Crackanthorpe’s opening description would have been unpublishable earlier in the Victorian period: It was a Saturday night, so the place was quite full – bargemen with grimy furrows across their bronzed faces; plenty of typical river casuals sucking clay-pipes; in a corner a group of pasty-faced youths quarrelling over their greasy cards; and scattered about the room some river-side prostitutes, their cheap finery all bedraggled with mud. A veritable Babel arose from these dregs of a population – hoarse laughter, snatches of songs and oaths. It was hot, a foul, unhealthy heat; the very walls were sweating, and a bluish haze was filling the room up to the blackened ceiling. (Crackanthorpe 1893: 107–8) In ‘London’, James had suggested that when prioritising the crucial aspects of a portrait of the city, a writer should ‘leave out what we may have to apologise for’, namely ‘[t]he uglinesses, the “rookeries”, the brutalities, the night-aspect of many of the streets, the gin-shops and the hour when they are cleared out before closing’ (James 1981: 18). Crackanthorpe greatly admired James, but was markedly unapologetic, in both theory (his Yellow Book essay, ‘Reticence in Literature’ from 1894) and practice, the stories of Wreckage (1893) and Sentimental Studies (1895) refusing to veil either their sexual content or their unblushing attention to the seamier side of city life. Crackanthorpe was not the only young writer using radical artistic techniques to depict ‘uglinesses’. Arthur Morrison’s sketches of London life, collected as Tales of Mean Streets (1894), featured all manner of unsavoury content, from violence and crime to knowledgeably itemised accounts of insalubrious domesticity. His ‘Lizerunt’ caused widespread controversy with its images of marital violence and prostitution (the story finishes very similarly to ‘A Struggle for Life’), stripping away the intertwined subplots that extended The Nether World to three volumes in order to concentrate on snapshots of its protagonist’s tragic life. Morrison was not, however, a simple chronicler of the city’s underclass. His London sketches had first appeared in the National Observer in 1893; W. E. Henley, the editor, openly admired Whistler and experimented with poetry that combined his interest in the artistic transfiguration of Thameside locales with musical allusions; his ‘London Voluntaries’ replace conventional titles with directions such as ‘Largo e mesto’ (‘slow and sad’). Morrison was regarded very much as a realist writer during the 1890s, the frankness of his fiction raising eyebrows; but he ought to be recognised for fusing the genre painter’s eye for detail with more radical evocations of the momentary that took inspiration from impressionist art. He and Henley became close friends, and Morrison may have offered informal assistance in the editing of A London Garland (1895), Henley’s illustrated anthology of London in verse. Another ‘tale of mean streets’, ‘To Bow Bridge’, almost erased the line between fiction and reportage in its account of a nocturnal tram ride across East London. Morrison had known Besant through the latter’s ‘People’s Palace’ scheme during the late 1880s, but the brutal bacchanalia of the ‘eleven-five tram-car’ from Stratford to

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Bow (Morrison 1983: 59) was a world away from Besant’s account of the same districts. ‘Blowses in feathered bonnets bawled hilarious obscenity at the jiggers’, the narrator observes (60). ‘The stramash overhead came tangled and swearing down the stairs, gaining volume and force in random punches as it came’ (63). Morrison described what happened on the tram, noting particular exchanges and people, but without being drawn into providing their histories or even names; the Scottish ‘stramash’ (uproar) serves as a brief clue that the tram carries people other than Cockneys. The ‘story’ in essence operates as Ford’s vignette would do, finishing with disembarkation at one stop and then the tram clanking onwards again into the darkness. Such material could make for anecdotal comedy, as in W. Pett Ridge’s ‘The Little Brown Bus’ (1903), but Morrison’s handling of it remains striking even when he is read alongside later modernists such as Joyce in Dubliners or Lawrence in ‘Tickets, Please!’ (1919). While Morrison’s first-person narrator created a visual and aural collage within the tram-car, Joyce’s ‘Clay’ opts for anaphora in focusing on Maria’s successive encounters as she journeys through Dublin: He was very nice with her, and when she was getting out at the Canal Bridge she thanked him and bowed, and he bowed to her and raised his hat and smiled agreeably; and while she was going up along the terrace, bending her tiny head under the rain she thought how easy it was to know a gentleman even when he has a drop taken. (Joyce 2000: 79) Morrison offers a dispatch from the front line, Joyce a retrospective commentary that brings out Maria’s naive attitudes. Both, however, fuse several different modes to convey experiences which some of their predecessors would have judged too prosaic for artistic representation. Lawrence by contrast opens his story with a thirdperson narrator presenting an account of the work of Nottingham’s female tram conductors. His prose imitates the rhythm of the tram’s hectic and erratic progress into the city, but the sense is of a naturalist or anthropologist describing a primitive tribe, the type of observation often seen in the work of the investigative journalists anthologised by Peter Keating in Into Unknown England (1976), or, more warmly, in the opening chapters of Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns (1902) or The Old Wives’ Tale (1908). As impressionism’s utility became ever more recognisable, technical experiment became a direct response to the demands of the physical environment. Morrison’s brief account of the tram journey shows how suited it was to the representation of everyday experience. One especially bold impressionist technique was the use of the present tense. Rarely employed in fiction before the twentieth century, it allowed for a directness and freshness of evocation which was perfectly suited to the bustle and dynamism of urban settings. George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunn) made particularly effective use of it in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894), notably in ‘Gone Under’, where Edith, penniless and dying from tuberculosis, flees through Soho: she swerves quickly into the street, still shielding her face, and breaks into a mad run; her wet skirt impedes her wavering steps and her poor rags flutter in the sharp wind, and, maddened by the memory perhaps, she utters a shriek that startles the passers-by . . .

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A policeman at the turn of Harrison Street walks towards her as he hears it; she screams hoarsely at him with the defiance of reckless despair, twice, thrice, never slackening her speed; further on, at a turning near Gray’s Inn Road, she stumbles, and falls heavily, but she picks herself up with lightning speed and scuds off again with a cough-broken curse. (Egerton 1894: 113) Edith’s desperate flight could be regarded as melodramatic, but a more sympathetic reading might identify a proto-cinematic quality in the sense of jostling through a crowd, the semi-colons allowing a fluidity of movement akin to that of a hand-held camera. Egerton, as elsewhere in her early stories, offers a vivid commentary on events, one helped here by her topographical specificity. As in ‘To Bow Bridge’, touches of realist observation and detail merge with the blurred movement so characteristic of impressionist painting, but the story also conveys how Edith’s travails are only one of the city’s many narrative moments. The passers-by and even the policeman do not offer aid; Edith is simply a shrieking destitute, forgotten as soon as she passes from sight. There is no sense of a Dickensian Providence in ‘Gone Under’ as Edith vanishes into the rainy darkness and, one assumes, a pitiful death. Charlotte Mew’s ‘Passed’, also from 1894, features vividly realised London scenes. Ana Vadillo (2005) has shown how women writers such as Amy Levy benefitted from public transport in their explorations of the city, watching it from the windows of trams, omnibuses and trains. Other commentators, however, notably Deborah Epstein Nord (1995) and Deborah Parsons (2000), have emphasised the continued importance of walking to an understanding of urban space. James wrote that much of The Princess Casamassima was ‘the ripe, round fruit of perambulation’, a result of his having ‘walked a great deal – for exercise, for amusement, for acquisition . . . as to do this was to receive many impressions’ (James 1934: 59); in his 1920 authorial note to The Secret Agent, Conrad confessed that he ‘had to fight hard to keep at arm’s length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over London’ (Conrad 1963: 11). In Mew’s story, the narrator goes out on a winter afternoon and wanders into a church where she meets a girl who beseeches her for help. ‘[H]er hand, grasping mine, imperatively dragged me into the cold and noisy street’, Mew writes. ‘We went rapidly in and out of the flaring booths, hustling little staggering children in our unpitying speed . . . The streets seemed to rush past us, peopled with despair’ (Mew 1894: 126). Again, the quick glimpse and the subjective perception replace the studied tableau of earlier fiction, anticipating their use in later city novels such as Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). In 1893, Symons identified impressionism and symbolism as the twin pillars of decadent writing. The first was governed by the senses – chiefly sight – while the second was more mystical, and concerned itself with ‘the truth of spiritual things to the spiritual vision’ (Symons 1893: 859). Both forms derived from realism, but departed it from it in crucial ways. For the impressionist, surface perception was more important than analysis or explanation. Just as the impressionist street scenes of Gustave Caillebotte, or the backstage ballerinas of Edgar Degas, consciously broke with the anecdotalism and didacticism of genre painting while retaining an eye for its detail, so impressionist prose conveyed atmosphere and experience without pausing to reflect on what they might mean. Symbolism, by contrast, lingered on surface details in the belief that their outward essence was a gateway for deeper, more profound truths. If the

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stories by Morrison and Egerton used realist and impressionist techniques to animate their particular Londons, Mew combined all three approaches, boldly mixing realist description (and narrative ingredients) with broader-brush impressionistic evocation and a contemplative awareness of underlying meanings.

Dense Mysteries of Dark Arcana: Detectives and Mystics As an artistic philosophy, symbolism was far more significant in Europe than in Britain. When Symons published The Symbolist Movement in Literature in 1900, he dedicated it to W. B. Yeats as ‘the chief representative of that movement in our country’ (Symons 2014: 3), but beyond Yeats’s compatriot George Russell (‘A.E.’) he listed no other writers in English. However, the fact that British and Irish writers do not tend to be regarded as symbolists does not mean that symbolist practices themselves did not take root in British writing. In his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde counselled: All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. (Wilde 2005: 168) I have suggested (Freeman 2013) that if one substitutes ‘cities’ for ‘art’ here, Wilde’s maxims offer a useful sense of symbolism’s importance in both sacred and profane understandings of urban space: as Arthur Machen put it in Hieroglyphics (1902) (and as Andrew Smith also discusses in his chapter in this volume), ‘[t]here are two solutions of existence. One is the materialistic or rationalistic, the other, the spiritual or mystic’ (Machen 1960: 71). When writing The Princess Casamassima, James was peculiarly sensitive to ‘mystic solicitation, the urgent appeal, on the part of everything to be interpreted and, so far as possible, reproduced’ and to London’s ‘mysteries (dense categories of dark arcana)’ (James 1934: 59, 61). Stories of mystery and detection frequently went ‘beneath the surface’, while more mystically inclined writers ‘read the symbol’ in a series of visionary engagements with the metropolis; one treating mystery in its contemporary sense of an unsolved puzzle, the other recognising the word’s ancient religious roots. James’s novel, with its anarchist conspiracies and ‘off-stage’ political intrigue, seemed to imply both meanings at the same time. Although Bleak House could be seen as a novel which many late Victorian writers wrote against, or indeed, ignored as irrelevant to the cities in which they found themselves, it was nevertheless a strikingly far-sighted work, notably in identifying a need for a means of interpretation that could make sense of urban environments. Jo, the crossing-sweeper, is ‘unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets’. Dickens’s narrator sums up the incomprehension and bewilderment of the illiterate semiotician. ‘[W]hat does it all mean,’ he asks, ‘and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me?’ (Dickens 1996: 257). Several answers suggest themselves. Understanding these symbols requires the learning of skills or techniques that he and many others do not have, or the possession of a key to their cipher. However, if the symbols lack any referent and are thus, strictly speaking, not symbols at all but merely signs that allude to nothing but themselves, they imply that

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London has become uninterpretable and incomprehensible, a human creation beyond the understanding of human beings. Forty years later, the questions recurred in Davidson’s The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender (1895), where the earl, baffled by the incomprehensible image of a pub’s sign, complains: ‘There is not a vein upon a leaf, not a scratch upon a pebble, not a torn word on a scrap of paper, without a message for me, and I am in despair because I cannot read the meaning here’ (Davidson 1895: 250). When, as Wells put it, ‘the whole world ha[s] changed into packed frontages and hoardings and street spaces’ (Wells 1994: 74), the ability to decipher surface meaning and understand the symbolic becomes all-important: a new form of metropolitan hermeneutics seemed to be necessary. Frequent comparisons between London and the labyrinth only intensified such beliefs. The need to solve mysteries and restore order drove the plot of Bleak House and produced, in the form of Bucket, one of English literature’s first detectives. Bucket was, however, a sleuth who worked largely through building up a network of contacts, witnesses and informants, rather than actively ‘reading’ crime scenes or evidence. His successors, most famously Sherlock Holmes, boasted far greater skills, combining inductive and deductive reasoning, remarkable attention to detail and, in Holmes’s case, what he terms in ‘The Red-Headed League’ (1892) ‘an exact knowledge of London’ (Doyle 1981: 185). Conan Doyle was by nature pragmatic and, until his later conversion to spiritualism, commonsensical, preferring practice to theory. These attributes were very much those of Holmes, and indeed, a number of the other late Victorian detectives who sought to rival him: Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, for example, or J. E. Preston Muddock’s Dick Donovan, the Glasgow detective. However, not all detective novelists were so hard-headed. Machen wrote several tales featuring a pair of rather inept amateur sleuths, Dyson and Phillips, who are better at appreciating the city’s mysteries than actually solving them, and also wrote at length about his explorations of London in three volumes of autobiography (1922–4). Chesterton went further, writing a brief but influential essay, ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’ (1902), in which he argued that the genre was a modern form of epic where the hero was a dauntless knight venturing into strange and bewildering regions governed by interpretive conventions very few properly understood. Chesterton saw the city as ‘a chaos of conscious forces’ in which: there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol – a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a postcard. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums. (Chesterton 1902: 158–9) Such a position seems at first very much like that of Davidson or Conan Doyle, while the reference to Babylon, a familiar comparison for London, seems to root the essay in a precise historical moment. However, as the creator of Father Brown, the amateur detective who is first and foremost a Catholic priest, Chesterton represents an intersection of the material with the spiritual and occult, a conjunction which (in this volume) Andrew Smith also sees as a feature of fin-de-siècle gothic. Providence is very much

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part of the landscape of the Father Brown stories and the Chestertonian worldview as a whole; man may have created chaos in the form of the city, but the divine will is everywhere manifest, and those with eyes to see recognise this consolation. Chesterton’s fiction was, in general, underscored by genial optimism, though there were exceptions to this, such as the civic squabbles which turn into bloody civil war in The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904). In it, Father Brown and other savants were able to apprehend God’s plan and preach a gospel of humorous tolerance and co-existence. Other writers, however, were far more pessimistic about the city, seeing in its outwardly hidden connections and signs terrible conspiracies, and it is clear from the anarchist and Fenian bombs of the 1890s, through to the mayhem of the Sidney Street Siege (1911), that the ‘terror networks’ which animate today’s politicians were very much present a century or so earlier. The most sophisticated of these fictions, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, involved a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, the literal centre of the world since the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884. In it, London was figured as ‘a cruel devourer of the world’s light’, seemingly ‘indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles’ (Conrad 1963: 10). Verloc, the treacherous intriguer at the heart of the novel, finds street signs misleading and considers them to be ‘topographical mysteries’ (21). His opponent, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, is cunning and resourceful but his insights bring about neither epiphany nor resolution. He, like everyone else in the novel, is ‘enveloped, oppressed, penetrated, choked, and suffocated by the blackness of a wet London night, which is composed of soot and drops of water’ (126), and can only watch as his fellow citizens seem ‘to pace out eternity, from gas-lamp to gas-lamp in a night without end’ (55). Such imagery, familiar from Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night, suggested that London was purgatorial or even hellish, the banal normality of its routines and accoutrements only serving to mask the terrible corruption beneath them. What Cedric Watts calls the ‘totalising, apparently unqualified negativity’ (Watts 1992: 18) of The Secret Agent was echoed in another novel from 1907, Machen’s The Hill of Dreams. Lucian Taylor, an idealistic young Welsh writer, moves to London and is gradually destroyed by loneliness, excess and his commitment to a novel which is revealed after his death to be written in a private and impenetrable language of his own devising. Sensitive to the city’s malign atmosphere and existing largely on tea and stale bread, Lucian thinks he may be ‘astray forever in a land of grey rocks’, London having become ‘one grey temple of an awful rite’ (Machen 1998: 142). Later, a drunken Saturday night encounter with a prostitute is transformed by his delirious imagination into a witches’ Sabbath in ‘the midnight country’ where he and the woman ‘writhed in the flames, insatiable for ever. They were tortured, and tortured one another, in the sight of thousands who gathered thick about them; and their desire rose up like a black smoke’ (Machen 1998: 195). Edwardian critics recoiled from a work they saw as a lurid remnant of decadence, but Machen’s imagery was widely shared, with the barbaric rites of a Saturday night somewhere between Shepherd’s Bush and Acton Vale strikingly like those of Heart of Darkness, not to mention much Evangelical and temperance literature.8 This detail chimes with, and may help to explain, Kirsten Macleod’s observations in Chapter 1 in this volume about the surprising popularity of apparently scandalous 1890s decadent works when reprinted in the early decades of the twentieth century. Machen’s Precious Balms (1924), his rueful scrapbook of his

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reviews, shows how such language could be used for the purposes of condemnation but not for the more complex ambivalences he sought to dramatise. As Kelly Hurley (1996) and Roger Luckhurst (2002) (among others) have shown, the city became a frequent setting for gothic fiction at the fin de siècle. This was partly because gothic writers had long realised that their audiences were far more frightened by the prospect of evil manifesting itself in their own world rather than in a fictional setting long ago and far away, but partly because the city was itself a gothic setting: mysterious, labyrinthine, dark, filled with secrets and violence. It was a site of horror, notably in the Whitechapel Murders of autumn 1888, and also of conspiracy. Gissing had felt, high-mindedly, that the novelist should bear witness to the injustice and brutality of contemporary life. Detective novelists such as Conan Doyle had said little about wider social improvement, but had concentrated instead on addressing individual instances of it, in his case usually among the middle classes. Gothic novelists, however, were liberated by the fundamentally subversive genre in which they operated, seeking to horrify and alarm rather than, say, use their repeated accounts of darkened streets as an argument for the wider provision of street-lights. Robert Louis Stevenson mixed violence and conspiracy with whimsical invention in his New Arabian Nights (1884), but two years later, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), he entered a very different realm. Borrowing the truncated style of a news headline for his ‘shilling shocker’, Stevenson conjured a world in which a child is trampled in the street (an incident which could easily have appeared in Gissing’s stories of slum life), and a judge is beaten to death with his own cane. Here, ‘lamps glimmered like carbuncles’ as the city is slowly ‘drowned’, ‘muffle[d]’ and ‘smothere[d]’ by the ubiquitous fog (Stevenson 1987: 32). Other tales of London gothic – Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), for example – also seemed to have very different rules from those of Conan Doyle or Dickens; Marsh cynically playing fast and loose with providential morality and all three writers suggesting that London’s conspiracies encompassed every level of society. Nobody could be certain what lurked in a foggy alleyway, but a privileged drawing room seemed just as injurious to health and well-being. Perhaps the most extraordinary of such fictions was Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), which somehow blended anarchism, Christian mysticism, whimsicality and satire with a visionary sense that sees the sunlit Thames as ‘a stream of literal fire winding under the vast caverns of a subterranean country’ (Chesterton 1946: 40). At such moments, the ‘city novel’ became the vehicle for metaphysical inquiry rather than simple materialist revelation, and in this way is reminiscent of the fin-de-siècle gothic aesthetic identified by Andrew Smith.

Conclusion As we have seen, there was no single, dominant approach to writing about cities in this period. Urban space defied representation from a single perspective, meaning that writers who persistently described the same places assembled composite or piecemeal images of them rather than a single defining image. James could not write ‘London Town’ but he could examine different facets of London in short stories, novels and travel essays. Symons chose the title London Nights for his third collection of poems in

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1895, emphasising the plurality he would subsequently contemplate at greater length in his abortive collaboration with Alvin Langdon Coburn, ‘London: A Book of Aspects’. By setting successive novels in the Potteries, Bennett was able to follow Zola’s Parisian example, developing towns which could be viewed from different angles and be studied as they developed. The short stories of Dubliners, meanwhile, build up a composite picture of the city and its inhabitants. Declan Kiberd points out that though the individual narratives are ‘bound together by themes, symbols, even characters, the collection does not quite become a novel’, perhaps because if they were to proceed beyond their closing images of paralysis, they ‘would exfoliate into a much more extensive and unlimited type of narrative’ (Kiberd 1998: 142), which was at that point beyond Joyce’s powers, but which would come into being in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and, most ambitiously, in Ulysses (1922). The late Victorian and Edwardian ‘word-city’, to use Burton Pike’s term, was therefore a fascinatingly diverse and complex realm. The experimental nature of many of its incarnations fed directly into modernism, but the likes of Egerton or Symons ought not simply be regarded as torch-bearers for the more famous writers who came after them. What should be recognised was the fascination with the ‘hugely artificial conditions of life’ which Machen noted in The Three Impostors, and the resolve to translate these somehow into art, concerns which are still motivating novelists and poets a hundred years later.

Notes 1. The book was to feature drawings by the American artist Joseph Pennell, who had illustrated some of James’s earlier travel books, and would provide the charcoal sketches for English Hours. The London Town drawings cost Heinemann £500, but were unpublished until they appeared in Sydney Dark’s London (1926). 2. London was certainly the primary setting for urban fiction during the nineteenth century; see Snell (1998: 24–5). 3. For example, the artist William Hyde’s collaboration with Alice Meynell, London Impressions (1898), and Ford Madox Ford’s The Soul of London (1905). As well as his collaboration with James, Alvin Langdon Coburn also worked closely with Symons on a book which would combine his evocative photogravures with Symons’s impressionist observations of London life. Coburn’s friend and benefactor Edmund D. Brooks privately printed a handful of copies of the illustrated text, but ‘London: A Book of Aspects’ was never published in full. Coburn instead reproduced his pictures in his folio London (1909), and Symons his essays in Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands (1918). See Freeman (2003). 4. For more detailed consideration of these ideas, see Freeman (2007). 5. For further discussion of such imagery, see McLaughlin (2000) and, more recently, McLaughlan (2012). 6. Much criticism of Gissing has been Marxist and/or feminist in orientation, stressing similar concerns to those outlined above. For an alternative view of Gissing and the ‘phantasmagoric’, see Scott McCracken’s essay in Spiers (2006: 86–99). 7. Smith, Elder, paid Gissing £150 for The Nether World. Four years later, the National Review paid him 30 shillings per page (460 words) for ‘The Day of Silence’, a story of little over 4,000 words (Gissing 1978: 320). 8. Machen’s novel was written between 1895 and 1897, though it was unpublished in volume form until 1907. Its composition therefore pre-dates that of Conrad’s novella.

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Works Cited Bennett, E. A. (1898), A Man from the North, London: John Lane / Bodley Head. Chesterton, G. K. ([1908] 1946), The Man Who Was Thursday, Bristol: Arrowsmith. Chesterton, G. K. (1929), The Father Brown Stories, London: Cassell. Chesterton, G. K. (1902), The Defendant, London: J. M. Dent. Conrad, J. ([1907] 1963), The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Crackanthorpe, H. (1893), Wreckage: Seven Studies, London: William Heinemann. Davidson, J. (1973), The Poems of John Davidson, vol. 1, ed. Andrew Turnbull, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Davidson, J. (1895), The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, London: Ward and Downey. Davidson, J. (1894), A Random Itinerary, London: John Lane / Bodley Head. Davidson, J. (1893), Sentences and Paragraphs, London: Lawrence and Bullen. Dickens, C. ([1853] 1996), Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury, London: Penguin. Dowling, L. (1986), Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Doyle, A. C. (1981), The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Egerton, G. (1894), Discords, London: John Lane. Ford, F. M. ([1905] 1995), The Soul of London, ed. Alan Hill, London: Everyman. Ford, F. M. (1924), Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, London: Duckworth. Freeman, N. (2013), ‘Chesterton, Machen and the Invisible City’, in M. Beaumont and M. Ingleby (eds), G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 73–92. Freeman, N. (2007), Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art, 1870–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freeman, N. (2003), ‘“One more ant dropped on the heap”: Arthur Symons, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the Lost London Book’, in P. Edwards (ed.), The Great London Vortex: Modernist Literature and Art, Bath: Sulis Press, pp. 20–30. Gibbons, T. (1973), Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in Literary Criticism and Ideas, 1880–1920, Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. Gissing, G. ([1889] 1992), The Nether World, ed. J. Goode, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gissing, G. (1978), London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George Gissing, ed. P. Coustillas, Hassocks: Harvester Press. Gissing, G. ([1898] 1903), Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, London: Gresham. Goetsch, P. (2015), ‘City Nights, City Lights in London Literature of the 1890s’, in S. Bach and F. Degenring (eds), Dark Nights, Bright Lights: Darkness and Illumination in Literature, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 15–34. Gosse, E. (1922), Aspects and Impressions, London: Cassell. Hapgood, L. (2005), Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture 1880–1925, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hurley, K. (1996), The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyde, H. M. (1969), Henry James at Home, London: Methuen. James, H. ([1905] 1981), English Hours, intro. L. Edel, Oxford: Oxford University Press. James, H. (1972), The Princess Casamassima, ed. L. Edel, London: Bodley Head. James, H. ([1894] 1948), ‘The Death of the Lion’, in N. Denny (ed.), The Yellow Book: A Selection, London: Spring Books, 17–62. James, H. (1934), The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Joyce, J. ([1914] 2000), Dubliners, ed. J. Johnson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kiberd, D. (1998), ‘James Joyce and Mythic Realism’, in K. D. M. Snell (ed.), The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 136–63.

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Kimmey, J. (1979), ‘The London Book’, Henry James Review, 1. 1: 65–78. Le Gallienne, R. (1895), ‘A Ballad of London’, in R. Le Galienne, Robert Louis Stevenson; an Elegy, and Other Poems Mainly Personal, London: John Lane/ Bodley Head, pp. 26–9. Luckhurst, R. (2002), ‘The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the “Spectral Turn” ’, Textual Practice, 16. 3: 526–45. MacColl, D. S. (1891), ‘The New English Art Club’, Spectator, 18 April: 544. Machen, A. ([1907] 1998), The Hill of Dreams, Leyburn: Tartarus Press. Machen, A. ([1895] 1995), The Three Impostors, ed. D. Trotter, London: Everyman. Machen, A. ([1902] 1960), Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature, London: Richards Press. Matz, J. (2001), Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLaughlan, R. (2012), Re-imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in Fin de Siècle Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McLaughlin, J. (2000), Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Mew, C. M. (1894), ‘Passed’, Yellow Book, II: 121–41. Morrison, A. ([1894] 1983), Tales of Mean Streets, Woodbridge: Boydell. Nord, D. E. (1995), Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City, London: Cornell University Press. Parsons, D. L. (2000), Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press Pett Ridge, W. (1903), ‘The Little Brown Bus’, in W. Pett Ridge, Up Side Streets, London: Hodder and Stoughton, pp. 38–46. Pike, B. (1981), The Image of the City in Modern Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Robinson, A. (2004), Imagining London, 1770–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Saunders, M. (1996), Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. Vol. 1: The World before the War, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snell, K. D. M. (1998), ‘The Regional Novel: Themes for Interdisciplinary Research’, in K. D. M. Snell (ed.), The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–53. Spiers, J. (ed.) (2006), Gissing and the City: Cultural Crisis and the Making of Books in Late Victorian England, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stange, G. R. (1973), ‘The Frightened Poets’, in H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. II, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 475–94. Stevenson, R. L. ([1886] 1987), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. E. Letley, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sutherland, J. (2009), The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, Harlow: Pearson Longman. Symons, A. ([1900] 2014), The Symbolist Movement in Literature, ed. M. Creasy, Manchester: Carcanet. Symons, A. ([1892] 1983), ‘Modernity in Verse’, in E. Warner and G. Hough (eds), Strangeness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism 1840–1910, vol. II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 233–4. Symons, A. (1924), Collected Works: Poems, vol. I, London: Martin Secker. Symons, A. (1893), ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 87: 858–67. Unsigned (1897), ‘Fathers of Literary Impressionism in England’, Quarterly Review, 369: 173–94. Vadillo, A. P. (2005), Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Watts, C. (1992), ‘Conrad and the Myth of the Monstrous Town’, in G. M. Moore (ed.), Conrad’s Cities: Essays for Hans van Marle, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 17–31. Wells, H. G. ([1909] 1994), Tono-Bungay, ed. J. Hammond, London: Everyman. Wilde, O. (2005), The Picture of Dorian Gray, in J. Bristow (ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. III, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilde, O. (2000), Poems and Poems in Prose, in B. Fong and K. Beckson (eds), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. I, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilde, O. (1994), Complete Works, London: HarperCollins. Williams, R. ([1973] 1975), The Country and the City, London: Paladin.

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4 Gothic Aesthetics Andrew Smith

I

t has become somewhat of a critical commonplace to acknowledge that the history of the gothic is characterised by a heyday in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, before the success of Walter Scott’s romances redirected attention towards a more explicit form of historical fiction. In this narrative the gothic returns in the mid-nineteenth century, discreetly infiltrating novels such as Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847), before regaining clearer cultural visibility in the sensation novel of the 1850s and 1860s. In turn the sensation novel is supplanted by the explicit gothic engagements of fin-de-siècle texts such as the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Great God Pan (1894), Dracula (1897) and The Turn of the Screw (1898). Such a history tends to assert that it is at moments of apparent social, political and economic crisis that a clear gothic tradition emerges – from the political turmoil of the French Revolution to fin-de-siècle anxieties centred on degeneration, the end of empire, and a perceived cultural crisis made symptomatically present through the allegedly amoral posturing of decadence. This anxiety model of the gothic has tended to see the form in political terms, leading to speculation about the radical or reactionary leanings of particular texts and authors (Jackson 1980; Smith 2013: 1–15).1 Whilst this has proved a productive way in which to relate the gothic to broad political contexts, discussion of the actual formal properties of gothic fiction, with the notable exception of the eighteenth-century gothic, has received relatively little attention. The eighteenth-century gothic aesthetic was informed by Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry (1757) and nuanced by the critical writings of John and Anna Laetitia Aikin (1773), Clara Reeve (1778) and Ann Radcliffe (1826), amongst others. By contrast, no such critically self-aware gothic aesthetic discourse has been identified as having emerged at the fin de siècle. This may seem strange given that even within the gothic mode of mid-nineteenth-century sensation fiction there is a self-conscious awareness of the form, one which Wilkie Collins sets out in relation to stage melodrama in the preface to Basil (1852) and within the evidentiary context established at the beginning of The Woman in White ([1860] 1985: 33), where the reader is invited to think of him/herself as a judge weighing the evidence of certain, often misleading, witnesses. How, then, is a fin-de-siècle gothic aesthetic, albeit an implicit one, to be accounted for? This chapter sets out to address this question by showing how fin-de-siècle gothic texts are pervaded by issues of fragmentation. It further argues that this mode represents a unique form of the gothic aesthetic, one which in turn helps shape a modernist aesthetic. One recurring feature of the fin-de-siècle gothic text is its complex, often multivocal, structure; Dracula is a key example, in which the novel’s form, consisting of diaries and journal entries, plus the occasional newspaper report, emphasises the role

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of individual acts of narration. Similar structures underpin Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan. Importantly, this kind of textual fragmentation can be related to wider issues of writing and epistemological understandings of the subject during the period, as described in this volume, for example, in Richard Menke’s account of new forms of communication technology at the fin de siècle and Nick Freeman’s observations about the ‘composite’ or ‘piecemeal images’ found in city writing. Indeed, it is often difficult to separate the issue of fragmentation from a wider consideration of acts of knowing, which in turn are often grounded within a quasi-scientific evaluation of what it means to be a person. Wilde’s famous quip in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that Jekyll and Hyde ‘reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet’ (Wilde 2007: 77) provides an implicit acknowledgement that science, and here specifically medicine, has a played a role in shaping a gothic aesthetic. This connection will be pursued later in this chapter, where I will argue that it is a key context underpinning both the fin-de-siècle gothic and the modernist aesthetic; but before addressing this issue more fully, my focus will fall initially on the work of Arthur Machen, whose ideas about writing constitute the closest example of a reflection on a gothic aesthetic that we can find during the period.

Arthur Machen: Literature and Duality Machen’s novella A Fragment of Life (1904) begins with the sentence: Edward Darnell awoke from a dream of an ancient wood, and of a clear well rising into grey film and vapour beneath a misty, glimmering heat; and as his eyes opened he saw the sunlight bright in the room, sparkling on the varnish of the new furniture. (Machen 2011: 148) Darnell’s rapid progression from a vision of ‘an ancient wood’ to the manufactured wood found in ‘the new furniture’ defines the duality of his life as a discontented, recently married, young man living in a London suburb. The suburb constitutes a liminal space, neither of the city nor of the country, one which also appears as a site of horror in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). Darnell’s dream of wild woods represents a desire for escape, and he embarks upon a journey in which he explores the place where suburbia runs out and something seemingly more pagan begins. This reaching out for nature represents a return to what has been lost through conformity to a suburban lower-middle-class life. In the house he discovers old family papers which suggest ways of reconnecting with a lost world of spirituality, with the tale noting that: Once, on a day of heavy rain he went to the ‘box-room’, and began to turn over the papers in the old hair trunk – scraps and odds and ends of family history, some of them in his father’s handwriting, others in faded ink, and there were a few ancient pocket-books, filled with manuscript of a still earlier time, and in these the ink was glossier and blacker than any writing fluids supplied by stationers of later days. (Machen 2011: 210) The story about the transcendent, mystical, paganistic vision that he finds in these documents contrasts with their textual materiality. Darnell contributes to this mystical discourse through writings of his own, including poems, so that a literary archive of a highly fragmented, although metaphysically coherent, textual kind is produced.

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The novella suggests that a new type of writing is needed in order to capture these new mystical experiences, and this task was central to the ambitions about writing depicted in Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907), in which his principal protagonist and aspiring writer, Lucian Taylor, is seemingly overwhelmed by his mystical, possibly Celtic, visions, and after his premature death leaves behind seemingly inscrutable textual evidence of what purports to be his transcendent revelations. Finding the right aesthetic is what Machen’s protagonists wrestle with, and his brief commentary about writing, published as ‘The House of Souls’ in 1922, is revealing in this respect: It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1889 that the thought occurred to me that I might perhaps try to write a little in the modern way. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing costume in literature. (Machen 2008: 3) The reference to ‘wearing costume’ reflects his work as a translator (of Casanova, amongst others), and this ‘modern way’ indicates the decadent style that his work so often closely followed. The Hill of Dreams was seemingly before its time, given that it took ten years before it was published. However, it was whilst working on the later A Fragment of Life that Machen began to reflect seriously on the nature of his writing; the result was Hieroglyphics (1902), in which we get a model of a gothic manifesto emerging, if a somewhat personalised one. The structure of Hieroglyphics is unorthodox, consisting of a narrator’s account of his ‘acquaintance’ with an ‘obscure literary hermit’, whose views on writing have been edited ‘into the imperfect and fragmentary notes’ which constitute the narrative: notes which are about writing, but which also reflect ‘some glimpses . . . of certain eternal, ineffable Shapes’ (Machen 1923: 5, 8). This literary figure extols the virtues of Poe’s Dupin, claiming that in the: detective processes, I find a faint suggestion of the under-consciousness or otherconsciousness of man, a mere hint, not, I think, expressed in so many words, rather latent than patent, that if you would thoroughly understand the rational man you must have sounded the irrational man, the mysterious companion that walks beside each of us on the earthly journey. (26–7) The detective solves mysteries, reflected in the narrator’s attempt to pull together his fragmentary notes to create a coherent narrative around the author, as these notes in turn try to establish a particular type of literary manifesto which centres on making sense ‘of that shadowy, unknown, or half-known Companion who walks beside each one of us all our days’ (31). The issue is therefore both metaphysical and aesthetic, with the narrator repeatedly affirming that authentic literature functions as an allegory in which symbolic, mystical truths are relayed via self-conscious literary tropes.2 Poe’s Dupin thus represents the desire to decode mystery and this sets him, metaphysically speaking, above the ostensible detective plots in which he appears. It is the desire to solve the problem which is key, not the actual solving of it. This distinction is clarified in a discussion of Jekyll and Hyde. The author says to the narrator: I expect that when you read it you did so with breathless absorption, hurrying over the pages in your eagerness to find out the secret, and this secret once discovered I imagine that Jekyll and Hyde retired to your shelf – and stays there, rather dusty. (70–1)

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The author sees the novella as plot-driven, and whilst ostensibly about the type of duality that underpins his interest in mystical visions, Jekyll and Hyde contains only one formal secret. Stevenson’s novella, in other words, lacks any complex allegorical vision as it conveys its message in the form of a plot-resolving denouement. This leads the author to discuss Jekyll and Hyde in physical rather than spiritual terms, because of the emphasis on the body and the laboratory, when he questions: ‘Don’t you see how thoroughly physical the actual plot is?’ (72; italics in original). When the novella reaches out for the allegorical it does so in ‘the most obvious vein of moral allegory’ (73). The chief problem for our narrator is that ‘The transformation of Jekyll into Hyde is solely material as you read it, without artistic significance; it is simply an astounding incident, and not an outward sign of an inward mystery’ (73). Hieroglyphics is an unstable text: at various points it promotes the idea of true literature as being defined by a complex mystical symbolism, whereas elsewhere it condemns allegory as a safe, overly didactic mode. Importantly, for the argument about a gothic aesthetic that is explored in this chapter, it is the form of Stevenson’s novella that appears to be the problem, ‘as it . . . has the body of a story without the soul of a story, the incident, the fact, without the inward thing of which the fact is a symbol’ (76). To reach this conclusion is to read Jekyll and Hyde in a particular way, and the extended treatment that it is given in Hieroglyphics is in part born of Machen’s clear frustration with a text which seems to have metaphysical options (on duality, for example) that it fails to develop. However, the scientific context of Stevenson’s novella arguably puts back a discourse about the mysteries of subject-hood, even if they are mysteries which cannot be assimilated by Machen to the type of pagan vision that he wants to pursue. Science should be read not as science, but as a way of understanding the self which in its allegorical mode generates an alternative form of knowing – a type of secondary knowledge which keeps open the door to mysticism, and which Machen himself explored in The Great God Pan. The issue of fragments recurs at the end of The Great God Pan in a chapter titled ‘Fragments’, where one Dr Robert Matheson gives an account of the death of the novella’s fragmented femme fatale, Helen Vaughan, who is part human and part the daughter of Pan. Helen has worked her way into London high society, which has led to the death of a number of men whom she has seduced and left economically destitute. Confronted by her crimes she is persuaded to commit suicide, an event recorded by Matheson, who witnesses how her physical dissolution recapitulates a Darwinian narrative of evolution: Here . . . was all the work by which man has been made repeated before my eyes. I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. The principle of life, which makes organism, always remained while the outward form changed. (Machen 2010: 70) This transformation might seem to invite Machen’s critique of Jekyll and Hyde, in which ‘The transformation . . . is solely material as you read it, without artistic significance’. The Great God Pan, however, links this idea of bodily fragments to textual fragments when it is noted of Matheson’s text that ‘[t]he MS was deciphered with great difficulty, and some words have up to the present time evaded all the efforts of

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the expert employed’ (68–9). This scene of writing is also associated with Helen, with Matheson recalling his horror of seeing ‘that which was on the bed, lying there black like ink, transformed before my eyes’ (69). Physical bodies are conflated with textual bodies; deciphering the text turns the reader into the type of detective that had been praised in Hieroglyphics because in Machen gaining metaphysical insight depends upon acts of textual interpretation. The importance of textuality is underlined in the novella by the figure of the occultist Clarke, who owns a bureau which: teemed with documents on the most morbid subjects, and in the well reposed a large manuscript volume, in which he had painfully entered the gems of his collection. Clarke had a fine contempt for published literature; the most ghostly story ceased to interest him if it happened to be printed; his sole pleasure was in the reading, compiling, arranging and rearranging what he called his ‘Memoirs to prove the Existence of the Devil’. (15) Clarke is a bricoleur whose compilation of fragmentary narratives includes much of the material referred to in the novella. The gothic aesthetic, as it emerges in Machen, is one that reflects the complex way in which mystical realities reveal themselves – through symbols, fragments and moments of epiphany. The baffled gaze of Matheson suggests the limits of conventional scientific epistemologies which register change without fully understanding it.

Locating the Self and Narrating the Self in Jekyll and Hyde Jekyll and Hyde may seem to sit outside of Machen’s aesthetic due to its apparent emphasis on the body over the soul; but closer scrutiny of Stevenson’s novella indicates that it, too, participates in a complex narrative about the relationship between the physical and the spiritual which is also, in part, reflected in the text’s fragmentary structure. Jekyll and Hyde breaks down into a series of narratives focalised by Utterson, Lanyon and Jekyll (and possibly Hyde). The emphasis on narrative is registered in the title of the opening text, the ‘Story of the Door’, which indicates that Enfield’s narrative is a text which also requires careful interpretation, as the mystery of Hyde is outlined as a problem of visibility in which Enfield claims ‘I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment’ (Stevenson 1984: 34). A failure of narrative indicates the need for a new way of writing, or here specifically representing, which can capture the horror of the moment. A gothic aesthetic is required to do this, and it is one which emerges within the slippery pronouns of the concluding ‘Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case’. Jekyll’s account begins with a brief autobiographical overview tempered by some considerations of how an adult life of middle-class respectability has led to the suppression of other feelings which are incompatible with his social status. Jekyll is quick to deny that this suggests duplicity because: I was in no sense a hypocrite: both sides of me were in dead earnest: I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of the day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. (81)

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Both parts of the self are authentic, whereas in Machen it is the shadowy double world where the truly, lost, human experience is to be found. Jekyll’s narrative, however, is prone to slipping around pronouns which reflect both this sense of a divided authenticity and an associated problem with representation. The narrative notes: Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edwards Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. (87) The move from the first person is telling, and thereafter we cannot be confident about whether it is Jekyll or Hyde who is narrating the text. The final line, ‘Here, then, as I lay down the pen, and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end’ (97), could be written by Hyde. Stevenson maps a version of the self that is complexly fragmented, reflected in the structure of the text itself and its multi-narrative form. The self seemingly eludes coherent interpretation, as evidenced by the widespread inability to describe Hyde with any clarity. The implication is that a new way of narrating is required in order to capture this emerging image of the fragmented self. This position moves Stevenson closer to Machen’s interest in manufacturing a multi-narrational gothic collage of different voices, one which is reflected in Clarke’s ‘Memoirs to prove the Existence of the Devil’. One stylistic context for Jekyll and Hyde is the media interest in sensational crime, reflected to a degree in the chapter titles, with the exception that Jekyll’s final narrative resists the type of closure that one might expect from a crime report. However, there is a wider context which also underpins this fragmented gothic aesthetic and which relates to scientific debates about where the human subject fits within a disciplinary system that also includes animals (and indeed at one point plants) – a topic which is also taken up in this volume by John Stokes in his discussion of humanitarianism at the fin de siècle. In scientific terms, where to place the ‘person’ is constituted as a complex taxonomic issue in the period, and the example of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which was established in 1831, is instructive in this regard.3 The structure of the BAAS’s annually published Proceedings reveals a scientific consensus about the presence of ‘life’ (which at various times created links between botany, zoology and human physiology) without there being a conception of what it means to be a ‘person’. By the 1890s, where you place the ‘person’ was subject to considerable disciplinary instability because at various points the differences between ‘Physiology’, ‘Anatomy’, ‘Zoology’ and ‘Botany’ were unclear. By the 1890s, ‘Physiology’ included a subcategory on ‘Experimental Psychology’ which seemed to suggest the presence of the human. However, there are slippages with other categories, most frequently between animals and humans. In 1894, for example, a report on animal responses to changes in temperature was included under ‘Physiology’ whilst under ‘Anthropology’ there were reports on ‘The Mental and Physical Condition of Children’ and ‘The Heredity of Acquired Characters’. Max Müller was president of the Anthropological section of the BAAS and in his presidential address, delivered in August 1891, he sought to develop a new theory of the person which related humans no longer to animals but to anthropology, using language acquisition to demarcate the ‘human’ from the animal kingdom. Crucial to his

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approach was the idea that one looked for similarities across cultures (through shared linguistic structures, for example) rather than differences. Such an approach was a rebuttal of a certain strand in anthropology which had understood difference as racial difference, and so came close (although Müller did not put it like this) to the ideas of physical difference that underpinned theories of degeneration at the time. Science, in all its forms, clearly had an issue with where, epistemologically speaking, the person should be placed; the idea that the person represents a problem for knowledge is one which is repeatedly addressed in the gothic of the period.4 Tellingly, many fin-de-siècle gothic texts are characterised by their engagements with science and scientists. In The Great God Pan a scientist such as Matheson bears witness to the biological inheritance of Helen Vaughan, which includes her associations with animals. Science so often observes but is unable to explain, as Jekyll acknowledges of his botched experiment when an impure chemical compound generates Hyde with his animalistic ‘ape-like tricks’ (Stevenson 1984: 96). Both Machen and Stevenson thus evidence a problem about where to locate humanity. For Machen it seems as though the person is only completed through engaging with a mystical reality that science cannot properly comprehend. Likewise Stevenson suggests the presence of a divided self that might be generated through a scientific procedure, although one which defies the rules of science. To a degree this is to acknowledge that both authors use science as a trope for a failed form of understanding, one which is synonymous with conventional models of knowledge which, as the example of the BAAS illustrates, in the end have little conceptualisation about what it means to be a person.

Wilde Science The scientifically fragmented subject, distributed over various scientific taxonomies, is reflected in the fragmented fin-de-siècle gothic aesthetic in texts which refer to science and which explore ideas about what it means to be a person. This divided subject reflects a wider issue about the relationship between the body and the soul which was also subject to some unorthodox scientific investigations during the period, and which have links to the Society for Psychical Research (founded in 1882), discussed below. It is helpful, however, to see how some of these ideas about divided selves, fragmented narratives and science were discussed more broadly within the fin-de-siècle gothic. Here Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) provides an unusual approach to these issues. Wilde’s novel contains within it a moral about the danger of turning an art-forart’s-sake aesthetic into a metaphysic, one which effectively repudiates the gnomic decadent manifesto of the Preface. Dorian embodies the amorality that was ascribed to decadent art and literature by reactionary cultural commentators of the time, such as Max Nordau. Lord Henry’s early assessment of Dorian’s character is evocative of the type of deliberations that we find in Machen. Lord Henry relates Dorian to: The new manner in art, the fresh mode of looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing herself, Dryad-like and not afraid, because in his soul who fought for her there had been awakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things

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revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real. (Wilde [1891] 2005: 199) Wilde’s vision might be more self-consciously platonic than Machen’s, but the suggestion of an alternative, if concealed, reality, that makes its presence known through the symbolic function of Art, unites them. It also suggests that this fin-de-siècle gothic aesthetic is difficult to distinguish from a decadent one, but it is the role of science which complicates the narrative and shifts the gothic discourse in a different direction – an issue made clear in the difference between how Lord Henry speaks to Dorian and how he analytically observes him. The discussion about platonic forms sits within a conventional idea of aesthetic engagement, but this becomes complicated when Lord Henry indicates that a more scientific evaluation of Dorian needs to be undertaken, one which is indebted to the principles of scientific investigation.5 It is noted of Lord Henry that: He had always been enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. (218) Lord Henry is implicitly cast in the role of Dr Frankenstein when it is noted that Dorian was ‘[t]o a large extent . . . his own creation’ (218), which leads into a discussion about the relationship between body and soul and where one begins and the other ends, because ‘There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality’ (219). Dorian, scientifically considered, might provide an insight into these relations because Dorian’s passion for experience provides an example of a life which seems to require the full engagement of both body and soul (which obliquely corresponds to Machen’s idea of pursuing ‘ecstasy’ through art in Hieroglyphics). Lord Henry speaks an aesthetic discourse but, his platonic ideas aside, he also thinks in a scientific one. The methods of science are important to his deliberations, and it is the idea of scientific methods and analysis of the soul which plays a key role in F. W. H. Myers’s The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903, revised 1907), a study which included Myers’s correspondence with Stevenson about the place of dreams and which has clear connections to the idea of the divided life in Jekyll and Hyde.

Myers and the Subliminal Self F. W. H. Myers was a founder member of the Society for Psychical Research who published widely on occult matters and sought to bring them under the purview of a rigorous scientific methodology. His posthumously published The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death attempts to explain matters of intellectual and artistic inspiration through a model of the spirit world in which the ghosts of the dead converse with the ghosts (the inner spirits) of the living, typically whilst the subject is asleep. Myers widens this model to include astral travelling through which the spirits (ghosts) of the sleeping subject meet and develop ideas that are returned to the subject who gains

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inspiration from them. Such a model transfers ideas of Darwinian progression to the spirit world in which the principle of evolution suggests an ever increasing refinement of spiritual ideas. Myers and Stevenson exchanged correspondence on the topic of dreams and Jekyll and Hyde. In 1886 Myers published an essay, ‘The Multiplex Personality’, which reflects on ‘the multiplex and mutable character of man’ that bears contextual relevance to Stevenson’s novella. Myers had also sent Stevenson his ‘Notes on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, in which he queried whether the murder of Sir Danvers Carew had been too easily attributable to a generalised notion of evil, rather than more plausibly developed through specific psychological models of cruelty (Myers 1981). Myers’s is an optimistic project which sees in Stevenson’s important ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ evidence for how the creative mind is stimulated through dreams, in which for Stevenson the ‘Brownies’ or the ‘little people’, changed his way of dreaming because: When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in his box seat, his little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile designs. (Stevenson 2006: 155) Myers quotes this passage and more widely argues that Stevenson’s essay represents an account of how the creative (if ‘mercantile’) imagination is stimulated by subconscious processes; he indicates that whilst such an imagination might be, on occasion, subject to nightmare visions this does not indicate the presence of degeneration. Myers is quick to rebut models of degeneration as having misread the evolutionary significance of the type of nervous disorder that Stevenson attributes to the presence of the Brownies. For Myers: [I]t is certain that not nervous degeneration but nervous change or development is now proceeding among civilised people more rapidly than ever before, and that this self-adaptation to wider environments must inevitably be accompanied in the more marked cases by something of nervous instability. (Myers 1907: 73) Fin-de-siècle anxiety can thus be referred to positive changes which are to be embraced, although they also need to be accounted for. Theories of degeneration have typically been advanced as one way of contextualising the gothic of the period, in part because so many gothic texts, such as Dracula, make explicit reference to Lombroso and Nordau. Indeed, the ‘ape-like’ Hyde who appears to be generated out of middle-class moral vacuity can also be made to correspond to such theories, which claimed that civilisation harbours within it the forces that will destroy it. Importantly, theories of degeneration produce a version of the subject which sits outside of the taxonomic instabilities found in the Proceedings of the BAAS. The degenerative subject may be emotionally unstable and physically malformed but the narrative about that divided life is a coherent one, even if it appears to rest upon a bastardised version of a Darwinian narrative of physical improvement allegedly challenged by the presence of degenerative atavistic forces. In ‘Zoological Retrogression’ (1891) H. G. Wells famously mocks Edwin Lankester’s Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880) for misappropriating Darwin by arguing for the presence of a disruptive atavism which undermines

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the evolutionary process. In reality Darwin emphasised the significance of adaptability to the environment, which means that in certain circumstances animals would have a greater claim on survival as a species than humans. These considerations might appear to be tangential to the type of gothic aesthetic which has been so far considered, but in fact they are central to it. Whilst the fin-de-siècle gothic texts discussed here can all, at different levels of explicitness, be related to theories of degeneration, it is also the case that they contain a contrary narrative about adaptability and the presence of a spirit world which works against this context. This is in turn reflected in the fragmented aesthetic of these texts. The degenerative self may be an unstable one, but it is produced through an internally coherent, if scientifically dubious, model of the self. Myers, amongst others, questions models of degeneration by asserting that fin-de-siècle anxiety is due to changes in the world which the subject struggles to accommodate. For him the chief change is the revelation that telepathy constitutes a new mode of communication which unites rather than divides. Anxiety is thus the consequence of the process of adaptability and is interpreted as evidence that genuine, positive, evolutionary changes are taking place at a psychic, indeed subliminal level (as Myers would coin the term). Such a position is not that far removed from Machen’s view that intimations of another world come through to the subject in oblique, symbolic forms, although here situated by Myers within the context of dream theory. Wilde’s mystical, platonic vision in Dorian Gray also corresponds with Myers’s position. Dreams, symbols and platonic influences are areas which cannot easily be assimilated to the emphasis on physicality which is central to theories of degeneration; they constitute an alternative and highly optimistic narrative about positive change. Indeed, texts like The Great God Pan, Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula all evidence a horror of the body which is alternatively corrupted, diseased and prone to exercising morbid control over the subject. Key to this alternative spiritual narrative is the issue of communication. If the mind, spirit and soul constitute an idealistic trinity, it is one which is repeatedly affirmed through the presence of the type of textual fragmentation that characterises the fin-de-siècle gothic. Machen in Hieroglyphics identifies ecstasy as the source for these symbolic messages, and Myers extends this by linking feeling to an idea of the author as a genius who: transforms what might in others be a mere vague and massive discomfort into a vivid though incoherent message from the subliminal storm and fire. The result is a kind of supraliminal duality, the perception at the same time of two personalities – the one rational and moral, the other belonging to the stratum of dreams and nightmare. (Myers 1907: 356) Stevenson seems uniquely to fit this model of the genius for Myers, and this is evidenced both by his essay on dreams and by a letter sent to Myers in 1892, in which Stevenson discusses a dream in which issues of representation (ideas of the aesthetic) are foregrounded. He notes one delirious dream in which he struggled to remember a nonsense word that Jonathan Swift may have used on his deathbed (Stevenson had been reading a biography of Swift the day before). Stevenson identifies a duality in this experience in which he tries to remember the word, only to be frustrated by the intervention of a figure identified as ‘the other fellow’ (357), who prompts him to compare the word with Lewis Carroll’s nonsense writings. Stevenson tries to reconcile

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this ‘I’ with ‘the other fellow’ as together they constitute ‘myself’, one ‘that kept me trying all night to get the word by heart, on the ground that it would afterwards be useful in literature if I wanted to deal with mad folk’ (357). However ‘the other fellow believed (or pretended to believe) he was reading the passage in a book where it could always be found’ (357; italics in original). The word is both recorded, in a book, and difficult to grasp. How to write ‘madness’ is suggested here, which implies a point of origin for a gothic aesthetic that is forged out of a subliminal process in which Stevenson sees ‘the other fellow’ as ‘the dreamer’ (358). Stevenson’s other dreams also reveal a struggle over words, indicative of the striving for representation that we saw in Machen and to a lesser degree in Wilde. If we read this gothic aesthetic in Myers’s terms, then it is possible to see it as an attempt to grasp new ways of thinking about writing and how they relate to notions of creative inspiration. The gothic aesthetic thus seems to represent an inward, selfreflexive and self-conscious turn, for which the clearest indication is the highlighting of the materiality of writing (Smith 2016). The idea that a fin-de-siècle gothic aesthetic is founded on the issue of communication and a conceptualisation of the subconscious can be made clear by a reading of Dracula.

Dracula: Communication and Self-Analysis The multi-vocal structure of Dracula assigns narrators to personal forms of record-keeping, including journals and letters. These personal narratives often unwittingly include information that proves to be vital in tracking the Count. Jonathan Harker’s journal, for example, includes several clues that the Count is a vampire which Jonathan records without understanding (including a facial description of the Count which is a paraphrase of Lombroso’s archetypical criminal) (Lombroso 2006; Stoker 1996: 17–18). In effect, isolated writers are turned into a community of readers, as private journals are offered up for collective scrutiny. The Count is ultimately defeated by teamwork but the issue of connection also operates at a more subtle level which aligns the vampire hunters with vampirism. The blood transfusions undertaken with Lucy, for example, turn the ‘Crew of Light’ into symbolic vampires as they take out her blood and replace it with theirs. Van Helsing also thanks Seward for an occasion when ‘you suck from my wound so swiftly the poison of the gangrene’ inflicted by an infected knife (Stoker 1996: 106). The vampire hunters are thus secret bloodsuckers, and the repeated emphasis on drinking in the novel (of tea, wine and beer in the main) articulates the theme of the consumption of fluids that aligns the vampire hunter with the vampire. The structure of the novel also suggests links between the human and non-human with the scene where Jonathan Harker is on the point of being seduced by three female vampires, closely followed by Lucy’s account of three wedding proposals. In scientific terms we can see a reflection of the taxonomic confusion of where to place the human in relation to the non-human in the Count’s ability to morph into animal form (a dog, a bat), which echoes some of the epistemic instabilities that contemporaneously appeared in the Proceedings of the BAAS. Dracula is a novel which presents in fragments (its multi-vocal structure), but which emphasises the importance of integration. The novel at an ostensible level employs a theory of degeneration to cast the Count as an irredeemable criminal type. However, the communal activity of reading, and the implicit links made between vampire and non-vampire, complicate

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this idea, as they imply the importance of similarity rather than difference. Dracula is thus a doubled text in the style of Jekyll and Hyde; it reflects some of the ideas that Myers regarded as integral aspects of the subliminal realm. This becomes noticeable in the scenes where Van Helsing places the infected Mina in a hypnotic trance which induces a form of telepathic astral travelling, with the entranced Mina initially indicating that she is not sure where she is because ‘Sleep has no place to call its own’ (312). In this Myers-like trance she is able to travel to the sleeping Count, and by the noises that she can hear, provide clues about his whereabouts on board a ship, which prove to be crucial in their pursuit. As the vampire hunters become vampire-like, so the Count becomes more human. His invitation to Jonathan Harker to come to Castle Dracula is ostensibly to sign legal documents, but in reality to refine his English accent. The Count also has a library of books and journals about Britain, and Harker at one point ‘found the Count lying on the sofa, reading, of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw’s Guide’ (22). Later the Count goes to post a letter wearing Harker’s clothes. Van Helsing also tells Seward that ‘this monster has been creeping into knowledge experimentally’ (302) and needs to be defeated before he gains a comprehensive grasp of their world. The Count heads towards humanity, and humanity becomes more vampire-like, in a novel whose multimedia structure anticipates the complexity of the modernist text. Indeed, the vampire puts in an appearance in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) when it is noted: ‘He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss. Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you’ (Joyce 1993: 47). T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922) makes a direct reference to the scene in Dracula where Harker sees the Count making a head-first descent out of a window: A Woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. (Eliot 1952: V. ll. 377–85) A high modernist engagement such as this may seem unusual. Charles Ko (2007), however, has also argued for links between Myers’s model of the subliminal mind and the modernist text, seeing the latter as similarly characterised by communication across different voices and textual forms (see also Smith and Wallace 2001; Riquelme 2008). Apparent fragmentation thus provides an opportunity for reintegration, which is, argues Ko, a feature of the Circe episode in Ulysses, but is also reflected in how communication is staged in Dracula and the other fin-de-siècle gothic texts discussed here. In that regard the gothic aesthetic should not be seen as a simple reflection of ideas about the dangers of degeneration; these texts are organised by broader principles pertaining to communication, similarity and integration. Indeed this impulse seems to work to correct the wider gothic anxiety model and can, in Myers’s terms, be regarded as a nervous adaptation of the gothic towards an emerging model of the

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subject which becomes caught up within the positive modernist drive for innovation. The example of the ghost story also illustrates how this process works more broadly within the gothic and within debates about aesthetics.

The Aesthetics of the Ghost Story: Vernon Lee and May Sinclair At one level the fin-de-siècle gothic texts discussed so far anticipate a modernist aesthetic, but it is an anticipation which is played out against an anxiety about the restraining influence of the past. Dracula represents a battle between the modern world (defined by its associations with modern technologies such as the Kodak camera and the phonograph, for example) and the presence of several centuries of European history, personified by the Count. The fin-de-siècle ghost story also seems to represent this backward turn, but in important ways also suggests that the past needs to be cast off, as its return represents the presence of malign forces and also a particular type of story-telling that this new gothic aesthetic needs to move beyond. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham have argued that Vernon Lee’s popularity came to an end with the advent of modernism. They support Vineta Colby’s contention that Lee ‘was too late to be a Victorian, too early to be a Modernist’ (Colby 2003: xii; Maxwell and Pulham 2006: 22). Lee’s very historical liminality is defined by this sense of looking back and struggling to look forward. Her historical methodology (as elaborated in her works on the Renaissance) insisted on an empathetic engagement with historical artefacts which would evoke the lost emotional responses of the Renaissance subject, and so bring the period back to life (Lee and Antrusther-Thompson 1912: 45–76; Lee 1881; see also Burdett 2011). Lee was scornful of the type of ghost stories submitted for investigation to the Society for Psychical Research and asserted that: the Past, the more or less remote Past, of which the prose is clean obliterated by distance – that is the place to get our ghosts from. Indeed we live ourselves, we educated folk of modern times, on the borderland of the Past . . . and a legion of ghosts, very vague and changeful, are perpetually to and fro, fetching and carrying for us between it and the Present. (Lee 2006: 39) This liminal fin-de-siècle position is addressed in her tale ‘Oke of Okehurst: Or, The Phantom Lover’ (1886, 1890).6 The tale centres on a painter who is commissioned by one William Oke to paint the portrait of his wife, Alice. To his pleasant surprise their ancestral home, Okehurst, is a well-preserved manor house which includes original family artefacts dating from the seventeenth century. The narrator is beguiled by Alice and regards her as a product of an earlier age, as reflected in her remarkable similarity to a portrait of an ancestor, also called Alice Oke, from 1626. The tale repeatedly emphasises the importance of matters of representation with references to art and poetry, tending to render Okehurst an unreal place which becomes animated through the narrative resurrection of the earlier Alice. The seventeenth-century Alice had embarked on an affair with a poet named Lovelock whom she subsequently murdered to end the affair, and after her jealous husband had bungled an assassination attempt. The modern-day Alice’s interest in Lovelock seems to taunt William, and at a ball in which houseguests play charades she dresses up as Alice in the type of male clothes that the first Alice had worn when she killed Lovelock (so mocking William

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as a latter-day bungler). After this, the modern day becomes increasingly subsumed within the older love story, which seems to haunt both her and William, until William shoots and kills Alice, firing from outside of the house through a window into a room in which he claims he saw the shadowy figure of Lovelock. The narrator’s growing horror is registered at the ball at which Alice dresses up. The ball represents a sartorial confusion of periods, places and cultures so that for the narrator: I felt suddenly as if I were in a madhouse . . . in the midst of this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, and parti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, and clowns, with faces painted and corked and floured over. . . . It seemed to me horrible, vulgar, abominable, as if I had got inside a madhouse. (Lee 2006: 138–9) Within this madness he senses ‘the body of Christopher Lovelock’ (139) as if it has been conjured out of this fragmented kaleidoscopic model of a gothic aesthetic that leads only to irrationality and death. William and Alice represent the last of the line of the Okehursts, so that history appears to repeat itself in order finally to bring history to an end. William and Alice are in effect trapped within a narrative which plays out their respective fates and suggests that a new aesthetic is required. Lee might assert that the ghost story needs to acquire its ghosts from ‘the more or less remote Past’, but so often in Lee the ghost also becomes an agent which lays that past to rest. Lee’s ghost stories represent a moment of transition in the fin-de-siècle gothic. Her work is not modernist, but it is also not Victorian, and in its reaching out for a new, if undefined, aesthetic it anticipates the type of gothic engagements which we have briefly witnessed in Joyce and Eliot. May Sinclair wrote in a modernist style and was friends with both Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound. Her Uncanny Stories (1923) also address ideas about a new gothic aesthetic that is rooted in a modernist epistemology which nervously looks towards the future. This is explicitly addressed in ‘The Finding of the Absolute’, in which a dead metaphysical philosopher named Spaulding discusses a model of history with Kant. Kant shows him a vision which encompasses ‘the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Franco-Prussian war, the establishment of the French Republic, the Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria . . . the Great war, the Russian and German Revolutions’ (Sinclair 1923: 359). Spaulding is shown a future history consisting of an ‘Indian Republic, the British Revolution, the British Republic, the conquest of Japan by America, and the federation of the United States of Europe and America’ (359–60). He is also shown the end of Britain, caused by ‘Atlantic Flooding’ which submerges much of the country. History is a political history of nation states occasioned by Sinclair’s post-war speculation on where the future will lie. New formations of power replace older forms, and it is implied that new modes of aesthetic engagement are required to make sense of these changes. Ghosts represent ideas in Sinclair, but they are also disempowered figures who can only observe and represent, rather than intervene. History gains the upper hand, and the gothic aesthetic becomes detached from the forms of power which shape the new world. However, this is not thereby an aesthetic of alienation.

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Notable in Sinclair’s ghost stories is the desire for communication and explanation. Post-mortem knowledge becomes invaluable, and throughout we have witnessed how the fin-de-siècle gothic repeatedly explores forms of knowing which depend upon the sharing of ideas. Myers’s views on astral travel and the subliminal mind represent one aspect of this interest. The gothic aesthetic undergoes considerable revision during the period, but from the pursuit of paganism in Machen to the metaphysical pursuits of Spaulding in Sinclair’s tale, there is a shared restlessness. Indeed Spaulding is described as ‘always worrying about metaphysics; he wandered from system to system, seeking truth, seeking reality, seeking some supreme intellectual satisfaction that never came’ (Sinclair 1923: 331). Only in death does he find what he is looking for; and this position is anticipated in the work of Machen, Stoker (with his dead undead vampires) and Myers. The gothic aesthetic at this time represents a desire to find the absolute, but also a wish to find that desire within a conversation which overcomes the putatively fragmentary nature of the gothic text. Ultimately the fin-de-siècle gothic should be seen as anticipating the modernist concern with making it new.

Notes 1. For a recent article that challenges the anxiety model of popular fiction, see Ferguson (2016). 2. I discuss these ideas in greater depth in Smith (2016: 164–92). 3. The British Association for the Advancement of Science produced annual Proceedings until 1938. The association still exists in the form of the British Science Association. 4. See my chapter on ‘Medicine’ in Saler (Smith 2015), where I also discuss points of contact between science and the fin-de-siècle gothic. 5. Michael David (2013) has explored Wilde’s interest in science, in particular around science of the mind, and this informs the account of Lord Henry’s deliberations. 6. The text was originally published as a novella by Blackwood in 1886 under the title A Phantom Lover: A Fantastic Story and later included as a tale in the collection Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (1890).

Works Cited Aikin, J. and A. L. Aikin (1773), ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, A Fragment’, in J. and A. L. Aikin, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, London: Joseph Johnson, pp. 119–37. Burdett, C. (2011), ‘“The subjective inside us can turn into the objective outside”: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 12. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.610 Colby, V. (2003), Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Collins, W. ([1860] 1985), The Woman in White, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Collins, W. (1852), Basil, London: Richard Bentley. David, M. (2013), ‘Mind and Matter in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 41: 547–60. Eliot, T. S. (1952) Selected Poems, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ferguson, C. (2016), ‘Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen, A. E. Waite, and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 21. 1: 40–55. Jackson, R. (1980), Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London: Methuen.

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Joyce, J. ([1922] 1993), Ulysses, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ko, C. (2007), ‘Subliminal Consciousness’, Review of English Studies, 59. 242: 740–65. Lankester, E. (1880), Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, London: Macmillan. Lee, V. (2006), Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, ed. C. Maxwell and P. Pulham, Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Lee, V. (1881), ‘Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art’, in V. Lee, Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions, London: W. Satchell, pp. 70–105. Lee, V. and C. Anstruther-Thompson (1912), Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics, London: John Lane. Lombroso, C. (2006), Criminal Man, trans. and intro. M. Gibson and N. Hahn Rafter, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Machen, A. ([1904] 2011), A Fragment of Life, in S. T. Joshi (ed.), Arthur Machen: The White People and Other Weird Stories, Harmonsworth: Penguin, pp. 148–222. Machen, A. ([1907] 2010), The Hill of Dreams, Cardiff: Parthian. Machen, A. ([1922] 2008), ‘The House of Souls’, in A. Machen, The House of Souls, Charleston: Bibliolife, pp. 3–6. Machen, A. (1923), Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature, London: Martin Secker Maxwell, C. and P. Pulham (2006), ‘Introduction’, in V. Lee, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, Peterborough, ON: Broadview, pp. 9–27. Myers, F. W. H. (1981), ‘Notes on Jekyll and Hyde’, in P. Maixner (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson, The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, pp. 212–20. Myers, F. W. H. (1907), The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, ed. L. H. Myers, London: Longmans. Myers, F. W. H. (1886), ‘The Multiplex Personality’, Nineteenth Century, 20: 648–66. Radcliffe, A. (1826), ‘The Supernatural in Poetry’, New Monthly Magazine, 16. 1: 145–52. Reeve, C. (1778), ‘Preface’, in C. Reeve, The Old English Baron, London: E. & C. Dilly, pp. iii–viii. Riquelme, J. P. (ed.) (2008), Gothic and Modernism: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sinclair, M. (1923), ‘The Finding of the Absolute’, in M. Sinclair, Uncanny Stories, New York: Macmillan, pp. 329–62. Smith, A. (2016), Gothic Death 1740–1914: A Literary History, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Smith, A. (2015), ‘Medicine’, in M. Saler (ed.), The Fin de Siècle World, London: Routledge, pp. 487–500. Smith, A. (2013), Gothic Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Smith, A. and J. Wallace (eds) (2001), Gothic Modernisms, Basingstoke Palgrave. Stevenson, R. L. (2006), ‘A Chapter in Dreams’, in R. L. Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. R. Luckhurst, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 151–61. Stevenson, R. L. ([1886] 1984), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories, ed. J. Calder, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 27–97. Stoker, B. (1996), Dracula, ed. Maud Ellmann, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wells, H. G. (1891), ‘Zoological Retrogression’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 271: 246–53 Wilde, O ([1889] 2007), ‘The Decay of Lying’, in J. M. Guy (ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Vol. IV: Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 71–103. Wilde, O. ([1891] 2005), The Picture of Dorian Gray, in J. Bristow (ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Vol. III: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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5 Catholicism and the Fin de Siècle Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

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atholicism suffuses the literature of the fin de siècle. In England and France the period from the late 1880s to the early 1900s saw a wave of important conversions, notably of Léon Bloy, Paul Claudel, J. K. Huysmans, Paul Verlaine, Aubrey Beardsley, ‘John Oliver Hobbes’ (Pearl Craigie), Ernest Dowson, ‘Michael Field’ (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), John Gray, Lionel Johnson and Oscar Wilde. But scholars have never been quite sure how to take the Catholicism of such figures, especially given the flexibility with which the most famous fin-de-siècle Catholics dealt with church doctrines – whether it be Verlaine’s unapologetic bisexuality or Michael Field’s reworking of the Trinity to incorporate their adored dog in Whym Chow, Flame of Love (1914). Thus, Richard Griffiths dismisses an influential figure like Barbey d’Aurevilly as an example of religious ‘dilettantism’ and ‘spiritual dandyism’ (Griffiths 1966: 98), while Karl Beckson balances the desire for ‘ancient, universal authority’ with ‘the aesthetic experience of Roman ritualism’ (Beckson 1992: 49). The implication is that professions of belief can be sorted into orthodox and unorthodox boxes, with the suggestion that a pre-Vatican II Catholic ‘aesthetics’ leant itself to decadently artificial appropriation. More recently, Ellis Hanson’s Decadence and Catholicism (1997) tries to turn this tide by arguing against the tendency to treat late nineteenth-century conversions as ‘a mere trend, a cultural aberration, or bad theater’ (1997: 14). For Hanson, aesthetics are inseparable from belief: ‘Decadent Catholicism is the assertion of faith as a work of art in an age when one ought to know better’, he insists; ‘Catholicism is embraced even as it falls to pieces’ (Hanson 1997: 10). Hanson’s approach has not displaced more sceptical critiques that regard fin-de-siècle Catholicism as more ironic than devout, more decadently perverse than pious, but it does open up a space to think through how Catholicism might signify across a range of positions – decadent, orthodox, secular or outright anti-Catholic. Significantly, although French Catholic Revival and English Catholic authors operated under very different political and theological pressures, they agreed that modernity was defined by moral, political and cultural decay, emblematised by the depredations of capitalism, individualism and secularisation. Catholic decadents and orthodox Catholics alike pointed to a rejuvenated church as the sole possibility for modern renewal. It was only Catholicism, John Oliver Hobbes suggested in A School for Saints (1897), that put ‘the eternal welfare of the Church’ first, and thus only Catholicism that could light the way out of modern individualism’s destructive social effects (Hobbes 1897: 87). With this in mind, this chapter will focus less on the purported aesthetic ‘aura’ of Catholicism, and more on the literary resonances of its theological and cultural influence. Thus, after briefly introducing the historical contexts for French and English Catholic practice at the end of the century, this survey explores three points of contact that illuminate the core anxieties and interests of

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literary fin-de-siècle Catholics on both sides of the channel: the critique of ‘realism’ and materialism; the paradoxical role of nostalgia in envisioning Catholicism’s future; and the arts of suffering, sacrifice and penance.

Catholicism, Culture and Politics Sheridan Gilley has argued that for English Catholics, the 1890s were marked by ‘steady expansion largely untroubled by internal dissent’ (Gilley 1999a: 21). Most of the outrage stirred up first by Emancipation (1829) and then by the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England (1850) had died down, as had the campaigns of the 1850s and 1860s to protect innocent young women by inspecting convents. As a novel like Mrs Wilfrid Ward’s One Poor Scruple (1899) suggests, with its upper-crust Catholic characters socialising with Protestants and unbelievers alike, English Catholics assumed that the time had come for them to engage fully in Protestant-majority politics and professions. Parliament removed the obstacles preventing Catholics from matriculating at Oxford and Cambridge in 1871; in 1896, the hierarchy, which had objected to such attendance on the grounds that it might corrupt young men’s faith, in turn lifted its proscription (McClelland 1973: 380–1). Some Catholics admitted frustration at the results of this long-standing policy. Edmund Randolph’s dystopian alternative history, Mostly Fools: A Romance of Civilization (1886), harshly denounces the hierarchy’s destruction of Catholic civic engagement: ‘We are absolutely without a single man to give an impulse in any direction that can be considered seriously’ (Randolph 1975: II. 68), the protagonist despairs. Randolph’s disgust speaks, too, to a real sense that the church should intervene in ‘a society marching to destruction in an abyss of moral decay occasioned by unbelief, which encompassed Protestantism’s apostasy from Christianity’ (Leighton 2015: 81) – if only the implosion of organised anti-Catholicism were not, ironically enough, sapping the strength of Catholic opposition. However, the push for the Oxbridge option hinted at something else about late Victorian Catholicism: its strong roots in the aristocracy and upper class. By the mid1890s, the church had ‘forty-three British Catholic peers with seats in the Lords and fifty-three Catholic baronet[s], as well as scores of landed Catholic county families, some of them the more distinguished for being untitled’ (Gilley 1999a: 25). This strong, frequently conservative, aristocratic presence was in ongoing tension with the Catholic working classes, still predominantly Irish and less consistently devout than their wealthier co-religionists. English clergy and laymen alike frequently regarded Irish immigrant Catholics with distaste, and objected to their ‘Irish nationalism’ as a ‘threat to the empire at its heart’ (Gilley 1999b: 154–8; 2009: 137). This class divide also manifested itself in the sphere of Catholic fiction: authors from the aristocracy or landed classes included E. H. Dering, Lady Mary Elizabeth Herbert, the Baroness von Hügel, Lady Amabel Kerr and the Mulholland sisters. The most prominent Catholic literary voices were therefore likely to occupy the paradoxical position of being simultaneously privileged in terms of social class, yet still the target of odium – although nowhere near as much as the previous generation. Late nineteenth-century English and French Catholic churches were alike in their Ultramontanism, or deference to papal authority. In the 1890s, however, the positions of the two churches were otherwise very different. After 1882, French schools were no longer allowed to provide anything other than a secular education, although a number

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of teaching orders flouted the new regulations, arranged for additional instruction or tried to establish their own schools outside the public system (Curtis 2000: 141–3; Gibson 1989: 128–30). Tensions increased in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, beginning in 1894, in which the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of espionage. The government that came to power in 1899, angered at right-wing Catholic influence in the military, first insisted that ‘[r]eligious groups and institutions . . . should be subject to state regulations and limits’, then in 1901 and 1904 proceeded to exile ‘whole monasteries and convents at a time’ before officially splitting church and state in 1905 (Byrnes 2005: 151–2). J. K. Huysmans’s L’Oblat (The Oblate) (1903) dramatises this process, as the protagonist Durtal, hoping to find rest as a Benedictine oblate, instead sees his congregation going into exile as he discovers that ‘[t]he modern Church . . . is impotent in the face of history’ (Lloyd 1990: 141). Pope Leo XIII’s call for Catholics to reconcile themselves with the Third Republic (Le Ralliement) further angered more ‘conservative’ Catholics, who felt that ‘liberal catholics were betraying faith for political conquest’ (Emery 2001: 29). Similarly, French Catholics joined with English in prioritising Marian devotion, but diverged when it came to the method. In England, ‘old’ Catholics (descended from recusant families) notoriously disapproved of converts importing devotional practices from the Continent; despite Cardinal Henry Edward Manning’s advocacy for devotions to the Sacred Heart, a major feature of French and Italian Catholic life, most English worshippers remained unmoved (Heimann 1995: 44). Converts were heavily influenced by John Henry Newman and the Tractarians, especially ‘the emphasis . . . on ritual and the sacraments, on the sacerdotal function, on the antiquity of Christianity, and the admiration of authors like Richard Hurrell Froude for the medieval church’ (MasurelMurray 2011: 30), whereas old Catholic families prized their independence and were sceptical of what they saw as the converts’ relative flamboyance.1 Still, Marian devotion itself was central to how post-Emancipation English Catholics consolidated themselves as a community, in terms both of worship and of Mary’s promises for England’s reconversion (Herringer 2008: 57–63; Leighton 2015). But although there was an important Marian apparition in the Irish village of Knock (1879) that became a popular pilgrimage destination, it never garnered the kind of attendance associated with the two key French shrines: La Salette and Lourdes. At La Salette in 1846, a sobbing Madonna delivered apocalyptic messages to two impoverished children, Mélanie and Maximin; at Lourdes, twelve years later, the adolescent Bernadette Soubirous experienced multiple visions of the Virgin. For fin-de-siècle French Catholics like Léon Bloy and Huysmans, La Salette’s apocalypticism was far more significant than Lourdes’ comforting promises. Thus, Bloy’s Celle Qui Pleure (She Who Weeps) (1908) denounced those ‘pious Christians’ who enjoyed the Virgin ‘crowned with roses, but not with thorns’ (Bloy 1908: 46). Lourdes could be assimilated to Bloy’s loathed ‘religion of respectability’ – the kind of worship Ralph Gibson describes as defined by ‘affectivity, sentimentalism, and a certain rather saccharine taste in iconography’ (Gibson 1989: 182) – whereas La Salette was the site of the ‘Mater Dolorosa’, celebrated repeatedly in Bloy’s work, who ‘mourns eternally for the homeless human race’ (Ziegler 2013: 658, 659). It is at La Salette that Huysmans’s Durtal sees a pilgrimage of peasant women whose faith is just ‘as man believed in the middle ages’ (Huysmans 1989a: 16): the hardship of the pilgrimage (La Salette was considerably more difficult to reach than Lourdes) is as much

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responsible for the sudden eruption of medieval spirituality into the present as is the nature of the peasant’s Catholicism itself. Bloy’s fascination with La Salette and its weeping virgin is inseparable from the doctrine of vicarious suffering – a doctrine that he, along with Huysmans and Paul Claudel, took to a heterodox extreme, and which had surprisingly little purchase in nineteenthcentury England. In its orthodox form, the doctrine became popular in France after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Clergy warned their listeners that this failure, along with the brief reign and brutal end of the Paris Commune in 1871, was ‘clearly a visitation of God’s wrath upon a nation that had erred – particularly in contributing, by deed and omission, to the loss of the temporal power’ (Gibson 1989: 246). Under the circumstances, the doctrine of vicarious suffering encouraged Catholics to throw themselves into the task of redeeming their sinful nation. Vicarious suffering enabled believers to emulate Christ’s passion and extend its action: ‘Just as Christ suffered for us, so we must suffer for, and, if necessary, instead of each other, “mystically substituting” our suffering selves for others, either to suffer in their place or to take their sufferings upon ourselves’ (Burton 2004: xviii). Bloy, Claudel and Huysmans took this a step farther: drawing on the heterodox theologies of the Abbé Boullan and the prophet Eugène Vintras, they argued that it was possible to experience and vanquish the actual sins or illnesses themselves (Griffiths 1966: 168–75). Women’s sufferings were central to this belief (Burton 2004; Ziegler 2012: 123–6), for they were best positioned to emulate the mater dolorosa. Thus, in Huysmans’s En Route (1895), a sulky Durtal, unable to overcome his sexual urges on his own, is told by the Abbé Gesverins that the nuns praying for him ‘will take the overplus of the assaults which you cannot conquer’ (1989b: 92). The astonished Durtal cannot work out if the results are spiritual or physiological – but nevertheless, the priest’s solution works.

Against Realism In Ernest Dowson’s short story ‘The Dying of Francis Donne’, a distinguished scientist nearing death finds himself abandoning ‘purely physical knowledge’ in favour of a return to his childhood Catholicism (1960: 145). Such discontent with empiricism’s adequacy as a mode of knowledge, along with distrust of a purely materialist realism as the framework for narrating the world, united French and English Catholics. Both insisted on the ‘individual’s relationship to God not as amorphous or anthropocentric but as circumscribed by grace (God’s help) and virtue (humanity’s capacity for good) in a theocentric collaboration which leads to a form of communal life between God and the human person’ (Sudlow 2011: 82). But their respective literary legacies engendered different attitudes to realist representation. Distinguishing between fiction in the French realist and naturalist traditions, and fiction of the French Catholic Revival, Malcolm Scott argues that whereas the realists treat religion as something ‘grounded in the tangible and the human’, Catholic novelists centre man’s relation to God, whether by transforming gothic tropes into a means of ‘destroy[ing] the reader’s comfortable expectations of a rationally coherent world’ or reimagining fictional narrative as a method of ‘reveal[ing] God’s truth’ (Scott 1989: 46, 89, 158). The French associated naturalism in particular with scepticism. For example, the protagonist of Emile Zola’s Lourdes (1894), the priest Pierre Froment, loses his faith on the pilgrimage. When Marie, the

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paralysed young woman whom he still loves, seems miraculously to recover her ability to walk, Pierre is appalled, for a doctor had correctly predicted the psychological steps that would lead to Marie’s healing. Yet, when faced with the possibility of challenging the miracle with ‘the other diagnosis, the one that allowed of the cure being explained scientifically’ (Zola 2000: 342), Pierre is reduced to self-loathing silence. More brutally, Octave Mirbeau’s Sebastien Roch (1890) attacks Catholic schooling as a destructive, oppressive system; the novel’s key revelation is that the most apparently spiritual of the priests, Father de Kern, is a child molester. De Kern appropriates the eroticised tradition of mystical love for Christ – exemplified, for example, in Paul Verlaine’s poem ‘Mon Dieu m’a dit’, a spiritual dialogue between a pursuing Christ who repeatedly demands ‘You must love me’ and the frightened sinner who fears to do so (‘Oh! no! I shake and dare not. Oh! I dare not love you, / I don’t want to! I’m unworthy!’) – as a mode of seduction. Alone with Sebastien, de Kern confesses that ‘[i]t is here that Jesus appears most clearly to me, where I touch his real flesh, so beloved of pain and sorrow . . . here where the ecstasy of loving him is boundless’ (Mirbeau 2000: 142; ellipses in original). Union with Christ turns into child rape, turning mysticism into displaced lust. For both Mirbeau and Zola, religious phenomena are real, but it is a reality of the brain and body, not of a mystery beyond the rational observer’s capacity to view or explain. The anti-Catholic implications of naturalism, rooted in quasi-scientific theories of heredity and environmentalism (as discussed in this volume by Sara Lyons), were sharply attacked by the major and minor Catholic novelists of the fin de siècle. Paul Bourget’s bestseller Le Disciple (The Disciple) (1889), published during Bourget’s drift back to Catholic faith, charts the decline and fall of Greslon, the follower of naturalist philosopher Adrien Sixte. Greslon’s project of putting Sixte’s theory into practice leads him to seduce a young woman, who then commits suicide; although her family’s attempt to have Greslon convicted of her murder goes awry, thanks to the Catholic honesty of the son, Count André, the Count nevertheless murders Greslon almost immediately after his release. Greslon’s inability to contemplate God or a future life, his classically decadent split subjectivity which leads him into paralysing self-analysis, and his difficulties with action all contrast sharply with the Catholic Count, whom Greslon simultaneously loathes and adores. For Bourget, the naturalist’s interest in how the environment ineluctably shapes human identity strikes a deadly blow at the very concepts of free will and sin. J. K. Huysmans, who himself began as a naturalist novelist, similarly challenged the adequacy of naturalist materialism in his quasi-autobiographical Durtal tetralogy. Indeed, Là-Bas (Down There) (1891) begins with Durtal, himself a novelist, arguing with a critic who warns against naturalism’s habit of explaining everything by ‘appetites and instincts’ (Huysmans 2001: 3). The revelations about magic and French Satanism that follow help liberate Durtal from his faith in empiricism’s adequacy; the later Durtal novels ‘attemp[t] to restore this perception of the direct working of providence in the world and of the unequivocal effectiveness of Christian ritual as a means of tapping the supernatural’ (Lloyd 1990: 123). Eventually they abandon conventional fictional narrative altogether, focusing on the psycho-spiritual drama of Durtal’s cycle of spiritual elevation and depression as he learns to decode Catholic art, symbolism, monastic practices and music. Huysmans’s quest for alternatives to materialist realism resonate elsewhere in fin-desiècle fiction, especially in Bloy’s novels Le Désespéré (The Despairing) (1887) and La Femme Pauvre (The Woman Who Was Poor) (1897). Like Huysmans, Bloy was a follower of Vintras, who advocated ‘a religion rooted in a personal apprehension of the

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divine, a controversial heterodoxy that glorified sacrifice and extolled the penitential suffering that distinguished an aristocracy of holiness from a bourgeoisie of hedonism’ (Ziegler 2012: 119). Both novels excoriate the filthy mediocrity of fin-de-siècle France, celebrating the abjection of their respective protagonists, the fiery author Caïn Marchenoir (a recurring character in Bloy’s work) and the much-abused Clotilde. Inverted Bildungsromane, the novels trace the total unmaking of each character’s self, as they lose all possessions, human attachments and, in the case of Marchenoir, spiritual consolations (he dies before receiving the last rites). In both cases, the narrative trajectories disable all possibilities that, in the realist tradition, could be taken as a waystation en route to God, such as a happy marriage or a moderately successful business. Thus, in The Despairing, the converted prostitute Véronique reacts to Marchenoir’s confession that he still desires her by having her hair shorn and all her teeth removed, staving off any resort to the realist marriage plot. At the same time, the narrator’s gruesome account of this event, complete with fainting and gushing blood, conjures up hagiographical accounts of the early Christian martyrs: the extractor is ‘an instrument of torture’ and Véronique herself an ‘astounding martyr’ (Bloy 1946: 129, 130). In this collapse of past and present into one, time violently ruptures to reveal God’s grace at work in a horrific, sordid, fallen world. The Woman Who Was Poor equally insists on unmaking its characters, but within a more explicitly prophetic framework. Early in the novel, Clotilde meets a sympathetic priest who urges her ‘When you are in the midst of the flames remember the old missionary who will be praying for you in the heart of the desert’ (Bloy 2015: 33).This moment prefigures the death of Clotilde’s husband in a terrible fire, a purifying blaze that Clotilde miraculously experiences at the same time; the priest’s prophecy is followed by Clotilde’s own prophetic dreams and her husband’s deal with God to exchange his life for divine justice against Clotilde’s persecutors. By the novel’s conclusion, Clotilde herself has passed beyond sceptical realism and into hagiographical narrative: ‘Marvels are related of her that are like those told of the Saints, but what seems really probable is that grace was vouchsafed her to have no need of rest’ (Bloy 2015: 354). Her glorious abjection in a state of absolute poverty embodies ‘the only certain way to remain uncontaminated by the greed and vulgarity of the modern world’ (Fraser 1994: 15). Rejecting the psychological rationalisations that might have been offered by Zola or Mirbeau, Bloy ruptures the fabric of realism with the operations of divine grace, comprehensible only to the believer. English Catholic novelists, however, had a different problem: they inherited a genre suffused not with scepticism, but with Protestant narratives, theologies and tropes (Scott 1989: 2–3). The difficulty, then, was not writing against realism, as the novelists of the French Catholic revival did, but rather writing from within it, appropriating genres ranging from domestic fiction to the sensation novel and turning their tropes inside out. Although English novelists incorporated miracles and direct communications from God, they were more cautious about addressing anything more than basic theology, and prized restrained asceticism over virtuoso modes of self-sacrifice. John Oliver Hobbes (The School for Saints) and the Irish novelist Mary Maher (Fidelity (1898)), for example, were nearly alone in even mentioning devotions to the Sacred Heart. By the same token, although English Catholic fiction frequently subverted the realist marriage plot by substituting convent and monastic plots in its place – as the conservative Catholic patriarch in Lady Amabel Kerr’s A Mixed Marriage (1893) says about his daughters, the nun is ‘the best off of the lot’ (39) – and debunked ‘happily-ever-after’ endings, it still celebrated the comforts of marriage, property and child-rearing. After Norah Leecroft, the eponymous Catholic governess of Frances

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Noble’s riposte to Jane Eyre, The Temptation of Norah Leecroft (1896), breaks her engagement to her sceptical employer Gerald Amersley because he will not raise their children as Catholics, her reward includes both his eventual conversion and his very wealthy hand in marriage. English Catholic novelists further showed how attentiveness to grace might transform even the kitschiest sensation plot. Maureen Moran argues for a mode of ‘Catholic sensationalism’ in Victorian literature, in which the ‘rhetoric of exposure’ can ‘unearth the buried forces in middle-class culture that belie its orderly, progressive self-image’ (2007: 14). In English Catholic texts, grace (and Catholic faith along with it) disrupts the ‘orderly’ construct of late Victorian English Protestant culture. One of the most dedicated practitioners of Catholic sensation fiction was the convert E. H. Dering, whose de Freville trilogy (Sherborne (1875), Freville Chase (1880), The Lady of Raven’s Combe (1891)) and final novel, The Ban of Maplethorpe (1894), all turn baby switches, murder, international intrigue, false identities and stolen inheritances to the service of celebrating both grace and the necessity of free will.2 In all four novels, Italy under the Risorgimento embodies how a nation can reject grace and, therefore, succumb to the siren song of evildoing, while in England, the worldly Protestants are incapable of grasping just how much damage they cause. In Dering’s world, ‘the only hope for a true conservative social order . . . lies now in Catholicism, since the Church of England, which once at least contributed to stability, is in disarray’ (Woodman 1991: 13). Within this context, only Catholicism enables characters to resist sensationalist machinations. For example, Everard, the hero of Freville Chase, nearly strangles the villain Moncalvo when he discovers that Moncalvo has tricked Everard’s beloved Ida into marrying him instead. At that moment, though, ‘[n]ature and Grace were brought into collision, and nature possessed his whole being, Grace appealed only to his soul’; the victory of Grace and ‘the habit of listening to it carried him through a temptation than which a greater cannot be conceived’ (1908: II.56). At this moment, it is not just God’s gift of grace that prevents Everard from killing Moncalvo, but Everard’s self-disciplined ‘habit’ of paying attention to it. The only way to survive sensational extremes is through a Catholic training that both elevates soul over body and makes the soul always aware of grace entering into it. The horrors of man’s sinful nature produce sensation; the glories of the free gift of divine grace enable the protagonists to triumph, even if that triumph must be delayed to the next world and/or is experienced solely in terms of lifelong penance.

Looking Backward to Look Forward: Nostalgia Dering’s loathing of the Risorgimento was part of his larger revolt against secular modernity; he was hardly alone in his disgust. In his influential first collection of Catholic verse, Sagesses (brought out in 1881 and in its fourth edition by 1896), the converted poet Paul Verlaine declared in ‘Non. Il fut gallican’ that he yearned to turn his ‘heart’ towards the Middle Ages, ‘far from our days of carnal spirit and sorrowful flesh’ (1896: 3–4). On both sides of the channel, Catholic authors looked at contemporary culture and were repulsed by its rejection of the church’s authority, its rampant consumerism – associated variously with nefarious Jewish, secularist, Masonic and Protestant influences – and its abuse of the poor. Modern secularism was especially dangerous because it neglected to ask if ‘human freedom has some purpose beyond self-direction and self-fulfilment [sic]’ (Sudlow 2011: 72) – a corrosive attitude that undermined the church’s corporate body.

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Many were further distressed by the effects of industrialisation, which both redistributed the population from (virtuous) rural to (corrupt) urban centres, and led to an explosion of degradingly cheap secular and religious commodities. Worse still, such cheapness invaded even the church’s aesthetics and liturgical practices. J. K. Huysmans meditated on the strange phenomenon of the commercialised Lourdes shrine, wondering in The Cathedral at ‘Jesus condescending to make use of the wretched arts of human commerce’ (Huysmans 1989a: 9) and marvelling again in his final quasi-novel, Les Foules des Lourdes (The Crowds of Lourdes), that the architects could design a church roof to look like ‘the colossal mould of a Savoy cake, flanked with three domed boiler-covers, made of zinc’ (Huysmans 1925: 25). His was just one of many arguments that ‘depicted the mixing of secular (especially commercial) and religious activities as an entirely new and appalling consequence of capitalist development’ (Kaufman 2005: 93). Although a separation of the commercial and religious had never actually been the case, this did not stop Catholics from harkening back to a pre-Reformation age in which religion (and not capitalist greed) organically formed all aspects of even the most horrifying human life. For an anti-clerical author like Mirbeau, such yearning for the past was merely delusional. His Abbé Jules (1888) features a subplot about Père Pamphile, a priest who debases himself to rebuild a Renaissance-era Redemptionist chapel destroyed during the French Revolution. Although the narrator represents Pamphile as a holy fool and admits that ‘more far-sighted souls might easily have perceived a kind of heroism in him’ (Mirbeau 1996: 88), nevertheless he dies gruesomely under his own building project. In Abbé Jules, attempting to further the church’s goals by returning to the past produces a literally and figuratively unstable edifice, constructed on no real foundation. Others, however, were far more optimistic about what Catholics might rehabilitate from a lost but glorious past. For both French and English Catholics, the Middle Ages were the first logical place to look. Nevertheless, this was a vexed enterprise, as ‘the medieval’ could be appropriated for Protestant, secular and liberal uses as easily as it could be for Catholic and conservative ones. A case in point was the sceptical poet John Davidson, whose ‘Ballad of a Nun’ (1894) rewrites multiple medieval legends about the Virgin substituting for wayward nuns until their return to the convent; in Davidson’s poem, the nun returns to find that no penance awaits, and that the Virgin implicitly approves of her sexual awakening. Similarly, two of the most significant nineteenth-century English medievalist texts to praise a church-oriented feudal society were William Cobbett’s A History of the Protestant Reformation (1824–6) and Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843) – both critiques of modern capitalism; neither a call for a renewed Catholicism. Even for English Catholics, invoking medieval saints could just as well be in the service of liberal or leftist politics as it could be a call for a return to lost traditions. The poet, critic and essayist Alice Meynell, for example, articulated her suffragist views in poems like ‘Saint Catherine of Siena’, in which a young man sentenced to execution finds rest on the ‘courageous breast’ of the young saint. ‘And will the man of modern years’, demanded Meynell, ‘ – Stern on the Vote – withhold from thee, / Thou prop, thou cross, erect, in tears, / Catherine, the service of his knee?’ (Meynell 1955: 19, 25–8). Medievalist politics were equally flexible in France. Victor Hugo’s bestseller Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) sparked interest in the conservation of medieval national monuments, and Hugo himself became an activist in the cause. But for Hugo, the cathedral’s significance lay primarily in its status as ‘a symbol of

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the French nation’s democratic and artistic heritage’ (Emery 2001: 14), and had little to do with Catholicism itself. By the same token, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, French Republicans seized the medieval legacy for their own nationalist (and secular) purposes, while tradesmen transformed religious art objects and stained glass into the mass-produced commodities so loathed by authors like Bloy and Huysmans, producing ‘a new breed of interior decorators, often less concerned with the values of the Middle Ages than with its noble accouterments’ (Emery and Morowitz 2003: 81). Still, fin-de-siècle Catholics on both sides of the Channel inherited a long-established tradition of treating the Middle Ages as the high point of Catholic culture – no matter how that culture was understood. René Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme (The Genius of Christianity) (1802) celebrated the medieval gothic church as both an aesthetic and a spiritual embodiment of authentic Christian faith. Later, the rise of the French pilgrimage industry yoked reconstructed medieval practices to very modern nationalist (and post-industrialist) imperatives, particularly as Lourdes’s limited local manufacturing economy was transformed by the religious tourism boom (Byrnes 2005: 95–120; Emery and Morowitz 2003: 143–69; Kaufman 2005: 16–61). In Britain, Walter Scott’s historical novels, especially Ivanhoe (1820), contributed to a mania for all things medieval that also appealed to those who yearned for a unified Englishness. This enthusiasm for knightly virtues also characterised Kenelm Henry Digby’s Broad-Stone of Honour (1844–8), which sought to revive a Catholic vision of medieval chivalric virtue for modern life – although its followers were as likely to be Protestant as not. In architectural theory, the best-known exponent of the gothic ecclesiastical revival was the Catholic convert A. W. N. Pugin, whose manifesto Contrasts (1836) contrasted post-industrial English architecture with that of the medieval ages; for Pugin, post-industrial architecture embodies the ‘greed, cruelty, social division and harshness of urban life’ (Alexander 2007: 76), unlike the communal Christian ethos of the Middle Ages. Although Emile Zola gently mocked Catholic enthusiasm for the Middle Ages in La Rêve (The Dream) (1888), whose heroine engages in sacred Bovaryism by obsessively reading the Golden Legend, his Catholic Revival contemporaries found in the Middle Ages not just an organic unity of church and state, but also a lost mode of virtuoso spiritual effort: the Catholic Revival was as annoyed with contemporary Catholics as it was with their anti-clerical opponents (Griffiths 1966: 232). ‘It’s a mystery of sorrow’, says a Carthusian monk to Marchenoir in Bloy’s The Despairing, ‘that a man such as you could be born in the nineteenth century. You would have made a Leaguer, a Crusader, a Martyr’ (1946: 110). But Marchenoir’s and Véronique’s spiritual forces are incompatible with the form of modern Catholicism itself, debased as it is by the sort of capitalist taint Bloy associated with the spread of Christian knickknacks and the cloying worship at Lourdes. Similarly, in The Woman Who Was Poor, the painter Gacougnol hymns the Middle Ages as a time in which Christ entirely suffused society, so that ‘[e]ven the very blasphemers and the men of blood were on their knees, because no other attitude was possible in the presence of the dread Crucified Christ who was to judge of men’ (Bloy 2015: 138). This is a Middle Ages in which Christ brings not a message of love, but the frightening promise of angry judgement, here deferred by no interceding Mary. And yet, these agonies also resulted in exquisite joys, manifested in ‘the stone-work of Cathedrals, the glowing . . . stained glass of their chapels, . . . the illuminated vellum of their Books of Hours, and our whole endeavour, when we have some scrap of genius, is to get back to that

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radiant fountain-head’ (Bloy 2015: 140–1). For Bloy, the Middle Ages marked the end of all such authentically Catholic art; modernity is too ‘irreligious’ to do anything but ‘create an art in its own image’ (Scott 1989: 153). Bloy’s belief in the supremely expressive quality of medieval Catholic arts and architecture, which preserve authentic Christianity even as the degraded present fails to realise the true import of what it sees, also underlies the notoriously museum-catalogue quality of Huysmans’s The Cathedral. Huysmans spends much of The Cathedral elucidating the symbolic meanings encoded in Notre-Dame de Chartres, which span everything from the crypt below to the towers above to the mortar holding it all together. As Durtal ruefully exclaims when his friend the Abbé Gesverins discusses the significance of candle snuffers, ‘It is the very madness of Symbolism!’ (Huysmans 1989a: 89).Yet the cathedral’s surplus of meaning, which to the modern gaze overwhelms as much as it enlightens (Hanson 1997: 166), depends on its medieval origin: the coming of the ‘Renaissance’, with its ‘pagan’ influences, Durtal argues, ‘extinguished that pure flame, and annihilated the luminous truthfulness of the Mediæval past, when God had dwelt intimately, at home, in souls; it substituted a merely earthly form of art for one that was divine’ (Huysmans 1989a: 105). The reign of symbolic architecture collapses in the wake of the Renaissance’s secularising impulses; after the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a church speaks in nothing but tawdry expressions of the human experience with no link to the divine. But a modern Catholic trained to respond to medieval cathedral architecture can find in it a source of religious renewal – thus, Durtal discovers in it ‘a reflection of the invisible world to which he strives [which] will help him overcome his attachment to the material realm and to approach God’ (Emery 2001: 118). If the bourgeois Catholic worshippers whom Durtal so disdains prove inadequate to the task of comforting him, then the company of the saints promised by the medieval cathedral may prove more helpful. In England, despite Pugin’s considerable efforts, Catholics fixated not on their own cathedrals, but rather on medieval ruins, expropriated properties and churches reconsecrated for Anglican purposes. The English landscape was thus marked everywhere by Catholic presence, even if the signs of that presence testified to Protestant conquest. But did the Middle Ages resonate in quite the same way for Catholics (and Catholic inquirers) in England? John Oliver Hobbes contemptuously dismissed ‘medievalism’ in A School for Saints as ‘bloodless effeminacy’ (1897: 23), even as she drew heavily on chivalric romance as an inspiration for her hero, and she was not alone in suspecting it of being lifeless. Shortly before his conversion in 1891, the poet Lionel Johnson meditated on Catholicism’s ghostly medieval architecture in a pair of ambivalent Petrarchan sonnets, ‘The Church of a Dream’ and ‘The Age of a Dream’ (which later appeared in his 1895 Poems). The church of the first sonnet, surrounded by ‘dead leaves’ (1) and attended solely by ‘one ancient priest’ (9), exists without worshippers or a living Catholic community; battered by the elements, it stands alone in an inhospitable literal and figurative landscape – ‘an isolated sanctuary entombed within the larger image of the world in seasonal and cultural decline’ (Lovatt 2014: 683). Yet the poem’s attention to the church’s vulnerability is in tension with its reminders that ‘the old saints’ (embodied in the stained glass windows) (5, 7) successfully resist the world’s efforts to shatter them. The saints are ‘[a]lone with Christ, desolate else, left by mankind’ (8), but Christ’s ongoing presence, including in the Mass that the priest performs in the sestet, nevertheless reminds the reader that the truth

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remains incarnate even in a world that has apparently abandoned it. However, ‘The Age of a Dream’, less optimistic, conjures up a lost age of ‘Saints’ (3) and ‘knights’ (5), only to complain of their disappearance, along with their values: ‘Vanished, those high conceits! Desolate and forlorn, / We hunger against hope for that lost heritage’ (7–8). The modern Catholic finds himself unmoored from the historical landscape, able to conjure up the ‘lost heritage’ in fantasy but unable to connect to it; the ‘we’ of Catholic community exists in negative form, defined by its demoralisation. Unlike the ‘saints’ of the stained glass windows, ‘desolate’ but consoled by Christ, the ‘we’ of the second sonnet is together only in its despairing sense of absence. In Johnson’s poem, Claire Masurel-Murray suggests, ‘only poetic vision . . . allows this vanished age to be brought back to life’ (2011: 18); unlike Huysmans or Bloy, Johnson neither finds sudden revelations of medieval Catholicism persisting in modernity, nor seeks to reincarnate it. Nevertheless, this gloom was hardly Johnson’s last word on the subject; his post-conversion celebration of Pope Leo XIII, ‘To Leo XIII’ (1892), ends with the prayer ‘Might some, so proud to be / Children of England, bring / Thine England back to thee!’ (22–4) – suggesting an organic unity between English culture (including pre-Christian English culture) and Catholicism (Murray 2013: 368). Perhaps too much meditation on the past disabled hopes for future returns. English Catholics had a second significant point of reference: the recusants, those Catholics who refused to conform to the Church of England during the reign of Elizabeth I. For Victorian Catholics, recusants provided the last through-line connecting a decadent Protestant modernity to an idealised, fully Catholic Englishness that could be perpetuated into the present and future. Historical novels about the recusants had been popular with Catholic audiences since the late 1850s, thanks to successful efforts like Frances Taylor (Mother Magadalen)’s Tyborne; Or, ‘Who Went Thither in the Age of Queen Elizabeth’ (1859) and Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Constance Sherwood (1865). Recusant narratives dramatised Catholic witness in the face of state-sanctioned violence, thereby offering both martyrological models of resistance and indictments of Protestantism’s persecutory bent. Moreover, recusant narratives had their own allegorical spaces – hidden chapels and priests’ hiding holes – signifying how Catholicism was simultaneously persecuted from without and preserved from within. Yet there remained some ambivalence about what recusancy meant in an explicitly Protestant moment. Edmund Randolph’s Mostly Fools is most savage in associating the recusants with a self-imposed intellectual and spiritual mediocrity, but he was not alone in worrying about the community’s ongoing cultural role. Although the American immigrant Louise Imogen Guiney celebrated ‘recusancy [as] a model of faith that was simultaneously nostalgic and progressive, a rejection of modernity, but one that focused on the physical traces of the pre-Reformation Church that to the Roman Catholic, were scattered all over England’ (Murray 2013: 360), her novella Lovers’ Saint Ruth’s (1895) also suggests the fragility of the recusant model.3 Its protagonist Langham, who in the seventeenth century heroically redeems his family’s earlier mercenary apostasy by returning to Catholicism, nevertheless covers up his fiancée’s rape and pregnancy, while wrongly treating the resulting child as a ‘curse’ (Guiney 1895: 14). This leads to the family’s total degeneration after the boy dies and both legitimate children turn out to be wastrels. The Anglo-Catholic frame narrator, descended from one of the children, eventually converts, continuing the Catholicism of the line – but, in becoming a monk, also wipes out the family itself. With similar ambiguity, the convert and satirist Thomas Longueville’s A Romance of the

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Recusants (1888) narrates the survival of a Catholic woman, Clare Sherringford, and the heroic convert and her eventual husband, Walter Murless, amidst danger from both Protestants and Catholics. At novel’s end, two Protestant passers-by contemplate what remains of the Murless/Sherringford estate, and one remarks: ‘English Catholics have much to thank Queen Victoria for’ (Longueville 1888: 245). If the Catholics still represent a line of unbroken, if attenuated, historical continuity, the condescending attitude of both riders to Catholics in general and the Murless family in particular also signals toleration’s limits – significantly, the Murlesses ‘don’t come forward enough in public matters’ (Longueville 1888: 247), suggesting that the trade-off for tolerance is a deliberately apolitical attitude that renders Catholics useless to the nation.

On Suffering and Penance as a Fine Art In his meditation on the seven sorrows of Mary, The Foot of the Cross; Or, The Sorrows of Mary (1858), Frederick W. Faber reminded his readers that [t]he highest devotion to our Blessed Lord is to possess ourselves of his spirit, to appreciate it, to welcome it, to feel in it, to act in it, to suffer in it. The more we can do and suffer all things in union with Him, the more excellently are we his disciples. (Faber 1858: 484) To be Christian is inseparable from crucifying the self, if possible with joy: as a character in Paul Claudel’s L’Annonce Faite à Marie (The Tidings Brought to Mary) (1912) exclaims, ‘It is not to live, but to die, and not to hew the cross, but to mount upon it, and to give all that we have, laughing!’ (Claudel 1916: 157). As we have already seen, the French Catholic Revival prioritised vicarious suffering, but its English counterparts did not follow suit; indeed, Richard Griffiths argues that it was not until Graham Greene that this became a significant part of the English Catholic literary tradition (2010: 103). Alice Meynell’s ‘The Divine Privilege’, in fact, seems to deny the possibility of vicarious suffering; the speaker, conscious of another’s wretched insomnia, bemoans the fact that Christ ‘wilt not suffer me to dream / That I can bargain for her rest’ (Meynell 1955: ll. 15–16). Moreover, despite the significance of Marian devotion in England, including to the mater dolorosa, the French Catholic emphasis on feminised suffering failed to translate across the Channel. Finally, the fascination in French Catholicism with dramatic physical suffering was downplayed in the English context: English Catholic authors reminded their readers of the need for self-discipline, but rarely celebrated the litanies of corporeal pain found in an author like Bloy. Representations of violent martyrdoms, while still popular, were frequently confined to historical fictions or poems written for an age in which the occasions for such heroism appeared to have vanished. Indeed, as we shall see, the most extended English literary engagement with bodily suffering occurred in a brutally anti-Catholic text. We have already seen how Bloy multiplied his characters’ agonies, stripping them of all profane attachments through ever-increasing psychological and physical torments. As Brenna Moore reminds us, however, Marchenoir’s, Véronique’s and Clotilde’s shocking sufferings are never articulated in terms of mystic substitution (Moore 2009 55), even though they indict the spiritual crimes of modern France. By contrast, Huysmans’s Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (Saint Lydwine of Schiedam)

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(1901) minutely explores how Lydwine’s decades of gruesome infection and illness turned out to be miraculously entwined with Schiedam’s fate. Lydwine’s forehead splits open, her body is filled with pus-filled ulcers, every extremity is mortified to such an extent that her body threatens to fragment into pieces. But despite being physically (albeit not mystically) immobile, ‘Lydwine, by the power of her devotion and her torments, protected Holland when it was invaded by the wastrels of Burgundy, and prevented a fleet from attacking Schiedam’ (Huysmans 1923: 27). The saintly body’s pains save the body politic by extending Christ’s redemptive sacrifice on earth. In this suffering, the saints ‘who re-act the anguish of Cavalry, who nail themselves to the empty place of Jesus on the Cross, are in some sort the counterparts of the Son’ (66). Taking the imitatio Christi to its furthest extreme, the saint voluntarily translates the apparently meaningless pains wracking her body into a comic plot of redemptive glory – even saving souls in Purgatory. For Huysmans, such activity is gendered: while male saints are defined by their peripatetic activity and rhetorical prowess, female saints ‘suffe[r] in silence on a bed’ (209). Yet women’s divinely granted capacity for mute suffering (although Lydwine talks quite a bit) makes them more influential than their male counterparts, for it is they who fully ascend to Christ’s place on the cross. In the conclusion, which circles back to the apocalyptic beginning by decrying how a spiritually deadened France is ‘soaked, nay saturated like a sponge, with Satanism’ (218), Huysmans calls for another Lydwine, capable of protecting the French from ‘the cataclysms that are preparing’ (221). In the tradition of medieval hagiography, this text is a model for contemporary readers, a means of encouraging ‘readers to participate in the continued celebration of Lydwine’s victory-by-suffering over the forces of evil’ (Postlewate 2004: 131) and to go and do likewise. In a degenerate materialist age, only the suffering of another saintly female body can redeem the nation from drowning in its own sins. The poet and dramatist Paul Claudel explored the redemptive powers of female suffering further in his plays La Jeune Fille Violaine (The Young Girl Violaine) (1892; 1898), later revised as The Tidings Brought to Mary and L’Otage (The Hostage) (1911). In the initial versions of La Jeune Fille Violaine, Violaine kisses Pierre du Chaon goodbye, an act misinterpreted by first her sister Mara and then Violaine’s fiancée Jacques Hury; in short order, Mara blinds Violaine with hot coals, throws her out and then marries Jacques herself, only for her son to go blind. After Violaine miraculously cures the boy’s blindness, Mara kills her. But the blinding, Violaine suggests, enables her own salvation: ‘Mara, you have cut the cord that held me, and I rest nowhere except the hand of God himself’ (Claudel 1910–12: 88) – the traditional association between physical blindness and spiritual insight, here severing Violaine from all earthly attachments. In The Tidings Brought to Mary, however, re-set in the Middle Ages, Violaine is explicitly a saint expiating Europe’s sufferings. The leprous Pierre attempts to rape her before the play begins, and suffers mystical punishment as a result; when she kisses him in forgiveness, she contracts the disease, which ravages her body for the sins of others. ‘The people have no father’, she later declares; ‘They look around, and they know no longer where the King is, or the Pope. / That is why my body agonizes here for all Christendom which is perishing’ (Claudel 1916: 106–7). Claudel’s revision transforms Violaine’s leprous body into a voluntary self-crucifixion; after her death (again thanks to Mara), her example reunites the surviving characters at the end in a promise of faithful community for the future. The Hostage more explicitly echoes the structure of

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Bloy’s novels: its suffering woman, Sygne, has devoted her life to restoring the aristocratic Coûfontaine family’s estate (lost in the French Revolution), which she intends to pass on to her beloved but more sceptical cousin George and his children. But when the Coûfontaines’s loathsome ex-servant, Toussaint Turelure, realises that George has hidden the rescued pope on the property, Sygne finds herself obligated to save the pope at the expense of marrying Toussaint – thereby betraying her family’s legacy, George (to whom she is engaged) and herself. Enraged, Sygne sternly tells the priest that ‘God gave me my life and I am ready to give it back. / But my name is my own! My woman’s honour is mine alone!’ To which the priest responds with the play’s key argument about the imitatio Christi: ‘It is good to possess something of one’s own, in order to give it up’ (Claudel 1917: 102). The Hostage advocates for the total abandonment of all things in which the self could be said to have ‘property’, for such radical giving is the only way in which humans can continue Christ’s voluntary sacrifice upon the cross. In giving up George, her sexual control over her body and, ultimately, her life (protecting Toussaint when George tries to kill him), Sygne re-enacts the Passion at the cost of every measure of human self-worth. It is no accident that she dies in cruciform position. Such dramatic acts of modern self-sacrifice often appear in English texts only to be ironised or subverted. Thus, Ernest Dowson’s poetic celebrations of monastic renunciation, like ‘Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’ and ‘Carthusians’, counterpoint the stillness of the cloister with the heat and rush of the world outside – but the poet remains firmly identified with the life of drinking and roistering, not prayer. Not everyone was as wryly playful as Frederick Rolfe (‘Baron Corvo’), who describes the martyred St. Sebastian as ‘shot as full of arrows as a hedgehog is of prickles’ (Rolfe 2008: 13); nevertheless, the English tradition seems sceptical of conventional scripts for modern sainthood and martyrology. Oscar Wilde’s prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis (1897), might seem to come closest to the French Catholic Revival in its drama of subjective loss. On the one hand, Wilde narrates how he loses his worldly self in entirety – ‘my name, my position, my happiness, my freedom, my wealth’ and eventually his children – en route to finally coming to rest in ‘my soul’ (Wilde 2013: 118). Such un-selfing is, as we have seen, integral to the French Catholic Revival’s celebrations of suffering; Wilde translates himself into Christ and Douglas into Judas (Masurel-Murray 2011: 96). Similarly, for Wilde, the age of heroic penances is past; he grieves that modernity provides the sinner with not even a Swinburnean ‘wattled house’, only granting the option that he ‘alter my name into some other name, where even medievalism would have given me the cowl of the monk or the face-cloth of the leper behind which I might be at peace’ (Wilde 2013: 159). Again, like Marchenoir, Wilde cannot articulate his sufferings within the vocabulary of modernity. But he identifies the monk and the leper with self-concealment, rather than with acts of ascetic penance, and rejects the resignation and even joy with which Bloy’s, Huysmans’s and Claudel’s characters embrace their divinely inflicted agonies; near the end of the letter, when he appears to have worked through his anger, he returns indignantly to Douglas’s unwillingness to write. And, as both Hanson and Frederick Roden have pointed out, Wilde’s theology does not really count homosexuality amongst the sins (Hanson 1997: 295–6; Roden 2002: 146–55). In fact, the text that addresses tropes of suffering at greatest length, Ethel Voynich’s pro-secular, nationalist and anti-Catholic novel The Gadfly (1897), translates them into sadistic forms with no use other than as mechanisms of oppression. Its protagonist, Arthur, begins the novel as a devout Catholic, but after he becomes part of the

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republican Young Italy movement, he suffers a series of disillusionments, climaxing in the discovery that the beloved priest Father Montanelli is actually his own father. The first phase of his sufferings results in deconversion to a fully secular mindset. By the time we see him again, he has undergone a series of humiliations on the road to reincarnating himself as ‘the Gadfly’, Felice Rivarez, a satirist and political pamphleteer. During his wanderings, Arthur/Felice is reduced to working as a servant for people of colour, an explicitly racialised form of suffering; is permanently disabled after being beaten by a Lascar; takes on a job working for slaves, again linking his humiliation to race; and winds up as a fake hunchback in a travelling show. All these sufferings are represented by Voynich as being both alienating and useless. Left rage-filled by both social and racial hierarchies, Arthur/Felice does not embrace abjection, but rather retaliates under the form of the gadfly’s painful sting. His sufferings climax towards the end of the novel when he begs Father Montanelli to acknowledge him, only to be rejected once more; invoking Swinburne, the narrator sighs that ‘[t]he Galilean had conquered’ (Voynich 1897: 341). To submit to Christ, then, is a meaningless rejection of personal needs that abandons the living world of human love for the dead letter of the church. Arthur/Felice’s own version of the Passion, involving a botched execution by gunfire, leaves him bleeding ‘[g]reat jets of blood’ over Montanelli’s hands, in a gory subversion of both stigmata and Pontius Pilate; the result, again, is not redemptive, but results in Montanelli himself going insane during Mass, crying ‘come then, and gorge yourselves, cannibals, bloodsuckers – carrion beasts that feed on the dead!’ (Voynich 1897: 367). Montanelli’s maddened visions of the sacramental bread and wine, which reduce transubstantiation to its most literal extreme, translate the rule of the church into a self-devouring cult of death. Nevertheless, poets of the 1890s also explored the paradoxical agonies of religious joy and pleasures of penance. Several turned to the mystic love tradition, including John Gray (who translated ‘Mon Dieu m’a dit’, among other poems by Verlaine); in his loose translation ‘Jacopone da Todi’, St Francis of Assisi, initially ‘expecting only sweet’, finds instead that ‘I suffer torments of a molten brand; / And all my heart is melted by its heat’ (Gray [1988] 2011: loc. 4412). Overwhelmed by a passion purifying in its destructiveness, the speaker finds himself rejected by a Christ who warns ‘Virtue availeth not without control. / Control the love wherewith thou lovest me’ (loc. 4615). Unable to restrain his passions, the sinful lover dissolves in longing for a perfection that is beyond all human possibility. More conventionally, Francis Thompson’s best-known poem, ‘The Hound of Heaven’, re-enacts this drama of lover and beloved, this time Christ stalking the fleeing sinner, with the steady beat of the verse underlying the ‘unperturbèd pace’ of Christ’s inexorable, terrifying pursuit. Like ‘Jacopone da Todi’, which counterpoints the bound-bursting excess of St Francis’s passion with the taut discipline of Christ’s response, ‘The Hound of Heaven’ revels in its paradoxes (‘traitorous trueness’ (Thompson 1913: I.108)) and its metrical variations, only to remind the reader at the end of each stanza that Christ draws inescapably nearer. The sinner’s alienation from the world and its people only resolves when, reduced to his most abject, the sinner finally accepts Christ’s free gift of love. ‘All which I took from thee I did but take’, Christ gently admonishes him, ‘Not for thy harms, / But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms’ (I.112). Union with Christ the lover brings with it all the joys lost to the sinner on earth, newly harmonised through communion with the divine. By contrast, Lionel Johnson’s ‘The Dark Angel’, itself a

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poem of paradoxes (‘Apple of ashes, golden bright / Waters of bitterness, how sweet!’ (Johnson 1895: 68)), explores the threshing of a soul pursued by damning temptations; the poem’s greatest paradox, and the speaker’s triumph, lie in the admission that ‘I fight thee, in the Holy Name! / Yet, what thou dost, is what God saith’ (68). Translating Jacob’s night-long battle with the angel (Genesis 32: 22–32) into an internal struggle between the soul and the devil, the speaker willingly submits in order to win the greatest prize – eternal life.

Conclusion Catholicism in the fin de siècle opened up multiple strategies for envisioning how society might be purified and renewed. For the leading figures of the French Catholic Revival, it promised a hard but ultimately joyous road of expiation for the nation’s sins, undertaken by souls willing to return to the inspiring wells of medieval sainthood. For their English equivalents, far less interested in vicarious suffering, Catholicism still provided a road back to an organic Englishness, away from the dangers of capitalist individualism and Protestant persecution. And for both, it was associated with forms of aesthetic expression available only problematically or aspirationally in a heavily secular, commercialised modern world. Even sceptics invoked Catholicism as a means of working through religious modes of thought to new secular forms. As both faith and figure, Catholicism could be an illusory escape from the present, a route to a purified future, or a tie to an ever-receding past.

Notes 1. When no English-language edition is available, all translations from the French are mine. 2. The discussion that follows has been revised from Burstein (2016b). 3. What follows has been adapted from Burstein (2016c; 2016a).

Works Cited Alexander, M. (2007), Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Beckson, K. (1992), London in the 1890s: A Cultural History, New York: W. W. Norton. Bloy, L. ([1897] 2015), The Woman Who Was Poor: A Contemporary Novel of the French ’Eighties, trans. I. J. Collins, South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press. Bloy, L. ([1887] 1946), Le Désespéré, Paris: Mercure de France. Bloy, L. (1908), Celle Qui Pleure: Notre Dame de la Salette, Paris: Société de Mercure de France. Burstein, M. E. (2016a), ‘A Romance of the Recusants’, The Little Professor, http://littleprofessor. typepad.com. Burstein, M. E. (2016b), ‘Freville Chase’, The Little Professor, http://littleprofessor.typepad.com. Burstein, M. E. (2016c), ‘Brief Note: Lovers’ Saint Ruth’s: And Three Other Tales’, The Little Professor, http://littleprofessor.typepad.com. Burton, R. D. E. (2004), Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Byrnes, J. F. (2005), Catholic and French Forever: Religious and National Identity in Modern France, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Claudel, P. ([1911] 1917), The Hostage, trans. P. Chavannes, New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Claudel, P. ([1912] 1916), The Tidings Brought to Mary: A Mystery, trans. L. Morgan Sill, New Haven: Yale University Press. Claudel, P. (1910–12), La Jeune Fille Violaine, in P. Claudel, Théatre (Première Série) III: La Jeune Fille Violaine, L’Echange, Paris: Mercure de France, pp. 5–157. Curtis, S. A. (2000), Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling and Society in NineteenthCentury France, Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Dering, E. H. (1908), Freville Chase, 2nd edn, 2 vols., London: R. and T. Washbourne. Dowson, E. (1960), The Stories of Ernest Dowson, ed. M. Longacre, New York: A. S. Barnes. Emery, E. (2001), Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-siècle French Culture, Albany: State University of New York Press. Emery, E. and L. Morowitz (2003), Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France, Aldershot: Ashgate. Faber, F. W. (1858), The Foot of the Cross; Or, The Sorrows of Mary, London: Thomas Richardson and Son. Fraser, T. P. (1994), The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe, New York: Twayne. Gibson, R. (1989), A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914, London: Routledge. Gilley, S. (2009), ‘English Catholic Attitudes to Irish Catholics’, Immigrants and Minorities, 27. 2–3: 226–47. Gilley, S. (1999a), ‘The Years of Equipoise, 1892–1943’, in V. A. McClelland and M. Hodgetts (eds), From Without the Flaminian Gate: 150 Years of Roman Catholicism in England and Wales, 1850–2000, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, pp. 21–61. Gilley, S. (1999b), ‘Roman Catholicism and the Irish in England’, Immigrants and Minorities,18. 2–3: 147–67. Gray, J. ([1988] 2011), The Poems of John Gray, ed. I. Fletcher, Greensboro: ELT Press. Griffiths, R. (2010), The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature 1500–2000, London: Continuum. Griffiths, R. (1966), The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature 1870–1914, London: Constable. Guiney, L. I. (1895), Lovers’ Saint Ruth’s: And Three Other Tales, Boston: Copeland and Day. Hanson, E. (1997), Decadence and Catholicism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Heimann, M. (1995), Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Herringer, C. E. (2008), Victorians and the Virgin Mary, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hobbes, J. O. (1897), A School for Saints, New York: Frederick A. Stokes. Huysmans, J. K. ([1891] 2001), Là-Bas, trans. T. Hale, London: Penguin. Huysmans, J. K. ([1898] 1989a), The Cathedral, trans. C. Bell, New York: Dedalus/Hippocrene. Huysmans, J. K. ([1895] 1989b), En Route, trans. W. Fleming, New York: Dedalus/Hippocrene. Huysmans, J. K. (1925), The Crowds of Lourdes, trans. W. H. Mitchell, London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne. Huysmans, J. K. ([1901] 1923), Saint Lydwine of Schiedam, trans. A. Hastings, London: Kegan Paul. Johnson, L. P. (1895), Poems, London: Elkin Mathews. Kaufman, S. K. (2005), Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kerr, A. (1893), A Mixed Marriage, London: Art and Book. Leighton, C. D. A. (2015), ‘Mary and the Catholic Church in England, 1854–1893’, Journal of Religious History, 39. 1: 68–85. Lloyd, C. (1990), J. K. Huysmans and the Fin-de-siècle Novel, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Longueville, T. (1888), A Romance of the Recusants, London: Kegan Paul. Lovatt, G. (2014), ‘Lionel Johnson’s Modern Ruins’, Victorian Poetry, 52. 4: 679–98.

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McClelland, V. A. (1973), English Roman Catholics and Higher Education, 1830–1903, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Masurel-Murray, C. (2011), Le Calice Vide: L’Imaginaire Catholique dans la Littérature Décadente Anglaise, Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelles. Meynell, A. (1955), The Poems of Alice Meynell, 1847–1923: Centenary Edition, Westminster: Newman Press. Mirbeau, O. ([1890] 2000), Sebastien Roch, ed. M. Jull Costa, trans. N. Simborowski, Langford Lodge: Dedalus. Mirbeau, O. ([1888] 1996), Abbé Jules, trans. N. Simborowski, Langford Lodge: Dedalus. Moore, B. (2009), ‘Feminized Suffering in Modern French Catholicism: Raïssa Maritain (1883–1960) and Léon Bloy (1846–1917)’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, 9. 1: 46–68. Moran, M. (2007), Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Murray, A. (2013), ‘Recusant Poetics: Rereading Catholicism at the Fin de Siècle’, English Literature in Transition, 56. 3: 355–73. Postlewate, L. (2004), ‘Translatio Lidwinae: The Adaptation of Medieval Sources in Huysmans’ Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam’, in E. Emery and L. Postlewate (eds), Medieval Saints in Late Nineteenth Century French Culture: Eight Essays, Jefferson: McFarland, pp. 119–38. Randolph, E. ([1886] 1975) Mostly Fools: A Romance of Civilization, 3 vols, New York: Garland. Roden, F. S. (2002), Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Rolfe, F. (2008), Stories Toto Told Me, ed. E. Miller, n.pl.: Valancourt Books. Scott, M. (1989), The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists, 1850–1970, Houndmills: Macmillan. Sudlow, B. (2011), Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England, 1880–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thompson, F. (1913), The Works of Francis Thompson, ed. Wilfrid Meynell, 2 vols, New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons. Verlaine, P. (1896), Sagesses, 4th edn, Paris: Léon Vanier. Voynich, E. (1897), The Gadfly, New York: International Book. Wilde, O. (2013), De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, ed. C. Toibin, London: Penguin. Woodman, T. (1991), Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Ziegler, R. (2013), ‘The Palimpsest of Suffering: Léon Bloy’s Le Désespéré’, Neophilologus, 97: 653–62. Ziegler, R. (2012), Satanism, Magic and Mysticism in Fin-de-Siècle France, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Zola, E. (2000), Lourdes, trans. E. A. Vizetelly, Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton.

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6 Secularism and Secularisation at the Fin de Siècle Sara Lyons

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cholars of Victorian literature and culture have only recently begun to think through the implications of widespread challenges to the secularisation thesis: that is, to the theory that the forces of modernity lead inevitably, or at least irreversibly, to a decline in the social importance of religion. More broadly, secularisation can be defined as ‘a transition in which things once revered become ordinary, the sanctified becomes the mundane, and things other-worldly lose their prefix’ (Demerath III 2001: 213). The Victorian age was once a crucial hinge in secularisation narratives: the mid-century crisis of faith was often understood as the moment when a demythologised Bible and modern science conspired to shake the foundations of belief, and the rationalism that was once the privilege of a few bold Enlightenment thinkers became common currency. This narrative has lost credibility in part because it has come to seem crudely triumphalist as a ‘subtraction story’, in Charles Taylor’s influential phrase (Taylor 2007: 26): it constructs history as a progressive march of reason, wherein we lose the childish illusions of religion as we acquire adult knowledge of reality. The secularisation debate in the fields of history, sociology and philosophy is also a debate over the proper definitions of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’. Critics of the thesis often suggest that it rests upon a thin definition of religion: it depends on church attendance statistics or the overt creedal commitments of an unrepresentative elite, when religion is by its nature an elusive and multifaceted phenomenon. Meanwhile, the related concepts of ‘secularism’ and ‘secularity’ have been placed under a great deal of critical pressure in recent years, generally as part of wider efforts to interrogate the universalist claims of the Enlightenment and Western liberalism.1 So far, scholars who have sought to re-evaluate Victorian literature and culture in the light of the destabilisation of the secularisation thesis have focused primarily on the early to mid-Victorian period – roughly 1840 to 1860 – and its famous ‘crisis of faith’.2 Most recently, Michael Rectenwald has suggested that one of the leaders of the Victorian Secularist movement, George Jacob Holyoake, anticipated some of the key arguments of Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), the book which has inspired much of the recent revisionary work on secularism and secularisation. According to Rectenwald, Holyoake’s model of secularism approximated Taylor’s view that modernity is neither religious nor secularised, but an ‘abiding tensile condition comprising the coexistence of the religious and the secular within a common frame’ (Rectenwald 2016: 7–8). Taylor refers to this condition as the ‘immanent frame’: the this-worldly, naturalistic understanding of the order of things that all modern people share. However, while many

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people continue to inhabit this frame as if it were open – that is, they remain receptive to God, or the transcendent, at least as a possibility – others assert its self-sufficiency (Taylor 2007: 539–93). What distinguishes secular modernity from the religious ages of the past, in Taylor’s view, is that unbelief emerges as a viable option, and both religious and irreligious perspectives are subject to ‘cross-pressures’ and mutual ‘fragilisation’ (Taylor 2007: 303–4). Rectenwald argues that Holyoake, who was actually responsible for coining the term ‘secularism’ in 1851, arrived at a similar insight. Holyoake claimed that ‘secularism’ was not equivalent to atheism, but a neutral, ecumenical plane of reference, akin to Taylor’s ‘immanent frame’. In Holyoake’s construal, ‘secularism’ was not an attack on religion as such, but a strategy for suspending theological controversies and prioritising this-worldly concerns (Holyoake 1896: 45–9). Holyoake’s ‘secularism’ also has a clear affinity with T. H. Huxley’s 1869 coinage, ‘agnosticism’: both creeds were an effort to place the question of God in brackets and to focus attention upon the natural, knowable world.3 Yet where the term ‘agnosticism’ gained intellectual authority by its association with scientific naturalism, ‘secularism’ remained linked with lower-class radicalism and scandal throughout the Victorian period. Rectenwald’s recuperation of Holyoake’s model of secularism is instructive because it illuminates the extent to which the Victorians were often struggling to find terms and conceptual frameworks adequate to the complexities of the religious (and irreligious) landscape of their age, and could themselves be subtle theorists of secularisation. In a restricted sense, it is uncontroversial to claim that the nineteenth century was an age of secularisation in Britain. The state gradually moved towards secularisation in response to political agitation on the part of communities which did not identify with the Anglican church: 1828 saw the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, relieving Dissenters from civic disabilities (Catholics were emancipated the following year); the requirement that students at Oxford and Cambridge Universities subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church upon matriculation was abolished in 1854; the Jewish Relief Act, which enabled Jews to sit in parliament, passed in 1858; the compulsory payment of church rates was abolished in 1868; and following a six-year struggle, Charles Bradlaugh became in 1886 the first avowed atheist to sit in parliament. Such political and institutional secularisation is what the sociologist José Casanova refers to as a process of ‘functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres’, and should not be equated with religious decline (Casanova 1980: 19). While in the case of Victorian Britain it helps to account for the tendency of late Victorian Anglicans to lament a loss of cultural power, it is compatible with overall levels of religiosity remaining high. Gauri Viswanathan has argued that such domestic political secularisation was partly underpinned by the need to regulate Britain’s expanding empire, particularly by the desire to implement a secular education system in India and to embed Indians in colonial administration. Viswanathan suggests that this concurrence of events introduces a politics of identity into both English and colonial life, where the grounds for Englishness are increasingly determined by the individual’s ability to become detached from the content of local or regional affiliations while maintaining their form. (Viswanathan 1998: 13) It is ‘secularism’ in this sense – the requirement that a person suspend his or her religious commitments in the public sphere in deference to an abstract rationality or a

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putatively non-sectarian liberal state – which has been the focus of intense critique in recent years, particularly from scholars of empire and postcolonialism.4 Although it is important to distinguish between the rise of such liberal models of secularism and the decline of religious belief, the two phenomena were as susceptible to being conflated in the nineteenth century as they are now. Both Holyoake’s concept of ‘secularism’ and Huxley’s ‘agnosticism’ have a clear kinship with a liberal model of secularism: they were attempts to stake out a strategic position of neutrality or disinterestedness in relation to religion in order to improve the quality of intellectual and political debate. Yet both Holyoake’s Secularist Movement and Huxley’s neologism still provoked anxieties about the decline of faith. Agnosticism was often suspected of being mere atheism in disguise, and religious Victorians sometimes signalled their rejection of the idea that a neutrality towards religion was possible by referring to ‘aggressive agnosticism’.5 What seemed striking to everyone in the late Victorian period was the degree to which religious doubt had attained respectability and even cultural prestige.6 Yet the meaning of religious doubt was ambiguous: was it compatible with faith, orthodox or otherwise, or was it tantamount to atheism? Did its apparent ubiquity herald the waning of religion, or religion’s evolution and liberalisation? In a sense, scholars of the literature and culture of the fin de siècle do not need to be warned against linear, triumphalist models of secularisation. Although the period is associated with Friedrich Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God, declining church attendance and the new cultural salience of unbelief, it is also often understood as a period of religious ferment. The fin de siècle is sometimes referred to as the ‘golden age’ of spiritualism and occultism, one which saw the proliferation of heterodox forms of spirituality as well as a burgeoning interest in both pre-Christian and non-Western philosophies and religions. Aestheticism and Decadence, arguably the period’s major artistic movements, are associated with a return to religion at the fin de siècle, particularly with conversions to Roman Catholicism, and with a tendency to collapse the distinction between the religious and the aesthetic. The literary culture of the period is also well known for its rediscovery of the romance form and the vitality of its gothic and fantastic fiction, which often freely cross-pollinates interest in mysticism or the supernatural with appeals to scientific rationality (as is discussed in this volume by Andrew Smith). Finally, many prominent late Victorian philosophers and scientists, such as T. H. Green, William James, George Romanes, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Sidgwick, wished in some way to reconcile religious belief with modern thought (an issue also noted by John Stokes in the chapter following this). Of course, such cultural trends could be cited as proof of the secularisation thesis rather than as counter-evidence, particularly if secularisation is taken to mean the erosion of orthodox theology and traditional religious practices: all attest to a blurring of the boundaries between the sacred and the secular, or at least to the growing popularity of non-dogmatic and non-institutional conceptions of the ‘religious’ in the period. Dominic Erdozain has recently mounted a forceful critique of how expansive definitions of religion, often intended to refute the secularisation thesis, neglect the theological concepts which ‘made religion meaningful for the historical subjects, rendering the crisis of those concepts a matter of irrelevance’ (Erdozain 2011: 64). In his own contribution to the debate, he traces what he calls the ‘secularisation of sin’ in the nineteenth century: that is, the process by which Evangelical morality gradually became detached from its theological roots, and came to operate as a self-referential, secular ethics by the century’s close (Erdozain 2010; 2011).

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As Nicholas J. Demerath III observes, critiques of the concept of secularisation are sometimes based on a straw-man version of its argument: that it posited a shift from ‘a world where religion is all to a world where religion is nothing at all’ (Demerath III 2001: 212). This indeed renders the concept implausible, since, as Vincent Pecora notes, it is extremely difficult to imagine what a society which had eliminated all vestiges of religion would look like. In what follows, I adopt Pecora’s view of secularisation as something bound to take a more circuitous, partial, and uneven path, one filled with digressions that periodically call its basic . . . premises into question, and that may provide, for both good and ill, a powerful resistance to any attempt to finish once and for all what [Jürgen] Habermas has called the ‘project of modernity’. (Pecora 2006: 22) The first section of this chapter considers the declining fortunes of the organised Secularist Movement at the fin de siècle as a means of grasping how the concepts of secularism and secularisation were understood in the period. The second section explores George Gissing’s and Thomas Hardy’s efforts to renovate the mid-Victorian subgenre of the crisis-of-faith novel and infuse it with the pessimistic rationalism of naturalism. The final section examines how three fin-de-siècle poets, Mathilde Blind, Rosamund Marriott Watson and Arthur Symons, drew upon the discourses of Aestheticism in order to contest the conventional equation of secularisation with disenchantment and to construct a language of secular affirmation.

Organised Secularism The organised Secularist movement in Britain was a peaceful form of popular radicalism with a membership drawn from the working and lower-middle classes and with roots in the Chartist and Owenist movements of the early nineteenth century. More broadly, secularism can be understood as a struggle to keep alive a tradition of popular irreligion unleashed by the French Revolution of 1789 and to assert the continuing political relevance of Thomas Paine’s demotic style of Enlightenment thought, particularly his attacks on ‘priestcraft’ and ‘kingcraft’. However, the fact that John Stuart Mill was the movement’s other great intellectual hero indicates the extent to which secularism was also a Victorian phenomenon, one that drew its sense of mission and identity from mid-century Liberalism. The Secularist movement did not simply aim at the separation of church and state, but represented the radical fringe of much wider debates about the moral and intellectual legitimacy of Christianity in the nineteenth century. Although its membership was always relatively small, Secularism had a significant impact on Britain’s political and cultural life, especially in the 1880s, its so-called ‘heroic’ decade (Royle 1980: 38). In this period, the movement drew national attention because of its most charismatic personality, Charles Bradlaugh, and his sensational battle to take up his seat as the first atheist in parliament. The energy and ideological coherence of the movement were also sustained in the 1880s by the fact that its long-running struggle against Britain’s blasphemy laws culminated in the prosecution and imprisonment of one of its leaders, G. W. Foote, in 1883. However, by the 1890s, the movement was in noticeable decline: membership had dropped and ideological fissures became stark (Royle 1980: 36–43). The Secularists were torn between the impetus to make common cause with other

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movements (most notably socialism) and the desire to assert the distinctiveness of secularism as an episteme and a political identity in its own right. The movement was also internally riven by the related question of respectability, with some of its membership wishing to maintain its dissident status and others seeking to establish its compatibility with prevailing cultural norms. In its years of growth, the movement coalesced around a shifting roster of cheap periodicals (The Reasoner, The Freethinker, The National Reformer, The Secular Review and a host of others) and rousing public oratory (lectures in town halls, street-corner speeches, open-air meetings). The fin de siècle finds the Secularist movement in a more inward-turning, reflective mood: this period sees the publication of biographies and autobiographies of its major figures, as well as partisan works of scholarship which attempt to situate secularism historically, such as J. M. Wheeler’s A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations (1889) and J. M. Robertson’s A Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern (1899). Yet this was not simply a period of retrospection. In 1889, Charles Albert Watts established the most successful of the movement’s publishing ventures, the Rationalist Press Association, whose headquarters in Johnson’s Court, London, came to be known as the ‘blasphemy depot’. It operated as a subscription book club and its membership grew steadily, reaching 3,000 by 1914. The press published freethought propaganda but also served as an important organ of more general secular education at the fin de siècle. Its sixpenny press reprint series reached a mass audience and helped to popularise the works of scientists and philosophers such as W. K. Clifford, Ernst Haeckel, T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer (Royle 1980: 165–7; Rectenwald 2016: 129–32). The fact that the press came to share Macmillan’s imprint in 1905 indicates the extent to which it had achieved mainstream respectability and occupied a ‘market niche that included both middle- and working-class readers’, as Rectenwald notes (2016: 130). Nonetheless, the press retained its secularist affiliations: it continued to fund lectures and publish cheap pamphlets by crusading secularists such as Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, Robert Ingersoll, Joseph McCabe and Robertson. Foote’s 1883 blasphemy trial is vital for our understanding of the interrelations between literary culture, religion and class in late Victorian Britain. As Joss Marsh has argued, the case represented the final stage of the gradual transformation of ‘blasphemy’ from a sin into a literary crime in the nineteenth century (Marsh 1998: 3–17). As such, it might be understood as an episode in the history of secularisation: in Marsh’s account, class-coded standards of literary taste, designed to keep religious doubt draped in a language of euphemism and accessible only to elites, took over the work of cultural regulation once performed by religious values. Yet it is difficult to interpret this process according to a familiar secularisation narrative wherein literature usurps the cultural place of religion, since it also attests to the enduring power of religion in the period: it reminds us of the social and legal penalties that remained attached to unbelief, particularly ‘scepticism expressed in plain language and sold at the people’s price’, as Foote himself put it (he was pointing out that blasphemy laws were enforced only in the cases of lower-class men like himself, whose critiques of religion were disseminated via cheap periodicals and pitched to a popular audience (quoted in Marsh 1998: 127)). Marsh persuasively argues that the legal distinction between polite religious doubt and blasphemy also structures the literary culture of the late nineteenth century, and is especially crucial to the works of George Gissing and Thomas Hardy, both discussed in detail below (Marsh 1998: 166–7, 269–327).

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The debate over respectability that began to fragment the Secularist movement may be understood in part as a consequence of an underlying confusion about the extent to which late Victorian Britain was undergoing a process of secularisation. Up until his death in 1891, Bradlaugh was committed to a confrontational model of Secularism: he saw virtue in assailing the Bible and Christian doctrine in incendiary terms, and embraced labels such as ‘infidel’, ‘iconoclast’ and ‘atheist’ to highlight the extent to which unbelievers remained subject to social stigma as well as civic disabilities. Holyoake, in contrast, championed a conciliatory model: as noted, he sought to differentiate secularism from atheism and conceptualised it not as a negation of religion but as an affirmation of the primacy of worldly concerns. In her 1895 biography of her father, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner noted that these conflicting models of secularism arose less from ‘difference of opinion’ – Holyoake was also an atheist – than from ‘a difference of the methods of advocacy of their opinion’ (Bradlaugh Bonner 1894: I.332). One might add that the conflict arose from different interpretations of the degree to which Victorian society was already secularised. Where Bradlaugh imagined that unbelief was an embattled minority position within a fundamentally religious culture, one that needed to be asserted through acts of public protest, Holyoake imagined that it was to a large extent already integrated into Victorian culture, and so only needed to frame its arguments in more inclusive and palatable terms. This difference of interpretation is apparent when, for example, in 1871 Holyoake recommends ‘ignoring Christianity’ as a secularist strategy. Bradlaugh Bonner, an ardent partisan of her father’s combative style, writes in response to this in 1894 that ‘[Holyoake failed] to see that in a country, Christian by law, with a State-supported Christian religion and Christianity taught in our schools, to ignore is impossible’ (Bradlaugh Bonner 1894: I.336). Bradlaugh Bonner’s biography of her father is designed to vindicate his brand of secularism against that of Holyoake, who had published his autobiography, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life, in 1892. It does so mainly by documenting in exhaustive detail the apparently incessant social and legal persecution that Bradlaugh faced from a fateful moment of religious questioning as a teenager – at fifteen, he was suspended from school for pointing out discrepancies between the gospels and the Thirty-Nine Articles – up until his death (Bradlaugh Bonner 1894: I.8–9). A romantic ideal of the freethinker as plebeian rebel and martyr was crucial to the self-understanding of the Secularist movement, and Bradlaugh Bonner predictably casts her father’s biography in this pattern. Yet the biography attests to more than her desire to aggrandise her father. As the age’s most famous Secularist, Bradlaugh was subject to ad hominem attacks by Evangelical Christians, some of which took the form of gossip about his private life and rumours of his deathbed penitence and reconversion to Christianity. As David Nash has suggested, such attacks may ‘provide evidence of a re-sacralisation of public space in fin de siècle England’ (Nash 2010: 240). Bradlaugh Bonner’s biography certainly indicates that she thought so: she devotes whole chapters to refuting what can seem like trivial calumnies against her father, such as the ‘Watch episode’ (Bradlaugh allegedly mocked the idea of an interventionist God by challenging the almighty to strike him dead should his watch stop in two minutes (Bradlaugh Bonner 1894: II.63–75)). At the very least, Secularists such as Bradlaugh Bonner continued to feel beleaguered by religious opponents at the end of the century; she measures her father’s heroism by the strength of the forces he was contending against, and evinces little confidence that the power of religion is withering away. Moreover, as Nash points out, the continuing proliferation of slander and

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religious counternarratives around key figures from the movement at the fin de siècle could make Secularists despair of ever achieving the secularised public sphere they had been campaigning for (Nash 2010: 257). The Secularist movement also waned at the fin de siècle because of the rise of unorthodox forms of spirituality and New Age philosophies which confounded the traditional distinctions between belief and unbelief upon which the movement depended for its rationale. The conversion of the prominent Secularist Annie Besant to the theosophical movement is often read as symbolic of the newly fluid boundaries between religion and irreligion in the period. It is also possible to see the Secularist movement as the ironic victim of the prevalence of its own axioms at the fin de siècle, at least insofar as appeals to the primacy of ‘this-worldliness’ gained an extremely wide cultural resonance. Boyd Hilton has suggested that late nineteenth-century Christianity may be understood as ‘the age of Incarnation’: it was broadly characterised by an optimistic emphasis upon the practical good that may be accomplished in this world, rather than upon human fallenness, asceticism and the afterlife (Hilton 1988: 5, 298–339). A similarly optimistic emphasis upon the immanence of the sacred within the self and the mundane world also marked many of the occult practices and philosophies gaining adherents in the period. As Alex Owen writes: Occultists repudiated the notions of a transcendent godhead existing beyond the forces of nature, preferring instead the formulation of the supernatural as a ‘state of consciousness’. [In this,] the occult articulated a unique expression of both the modern drive for ‘self-realisation’ and a contemporary impulse toward spirituality. (Owen 2007: 147) Finally, the fact that from the 1880s onwards socialism began to siphon off the working-class radicalism which had sustained the Secularist movement might be understood less as an eclipse of Secularism than as its logical fulfilment, at least insofar as Secularism was – according to Holyoake’s definition – an injunction to prioritise the claims of this world over theological questions. Bradlaugh Bonner noted that many Secularists became increasingly preoccupied with the so-called ‘Social Question’ in the 1880s: the growth of population in our great cities has caused the evils of poverty to press more closely upon general attention, and the public energy is directed towards seeking a solution for these immediately important problems, rather than for the more abstract theorems arising out of religious speculation. (Bradlaugh Bonner 1894: II.14) Nonetheless, the fact that leading Secularists such as Bradlaugh and Foote were staunch Liberals, preoccupied with individual liberties and hostile to the collectivist ethic of socialism, meant that the two movements became antagonistic even as secularism provided a conduit for the spread of socialist ideas (Royle 1980: 232–41). Thus Holyoake’s insistence that Secularism was an elastic, ecumenical creed which could unite believers and unbelievers in a commitment to ‘this-worldism’ was arguably vindicated at the fin de siècle, although in ways which tended to marginalise the Secularist movement.

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The elasticity of the concept of secularism at the fin de siècle is also evident in A Short History of Freethought. Robertson was a polymath and autodidact from a poor Scottish family and perhaps the most intellectually formidable member of the Secularist movement, as well as one of its most prolific writers. His choice of title belies the sweeping ambition of the work: it is an effort to establish that freethought is a primordial impulse that transcends time and culture, and accordingly the book devotes chapters to an astonishing range of subjects, including freethought in ancient China, Egypt, India and Peru, among other civilisations; freethought within Islam; freethought as an aspect of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the French Revolution; comparative analyses of freethought in nineteenth-century America and Britain, Germany, Russia and Scandinavia; and the place of freethought in modern science, philosophy, sociology and literature. Robertson was self-conscious about the novelty of his project: he points out in his introduction that his is the first effort to write a history of freethought at once sympathetic and global in its reach (Robertson 1899: 6–9). As one would expect, his definition of his subject is capacious: freethought is, in his view, ‘a conscious reaction against some phase or phases of conventional or traditional doctrine in religion – on the one hand, a claim to think freely, in the sense not of disregard for logic but of special loyalty to it’ (Robertson 1899: 5). The crisp authority with which he lays claim to vast stretches of history and culture as part of the genealogy of modern secularism would seem to attest to the extent to which secularism had gained intellectual confidence by the fin de siècle, even as it lost momentum as an organised movement. Contemporary reviewers, though respectful of Robertson’s erudition, questioned the legitimacy of subsuming such a welter of historical and cultural developments under the category of ‘freethought’, especially since so many of the freethinkers under discussion would have professed themselves pious.7 Robertson’s book certainly indicates how the emergence of secularism as an avowable conviction and mode of identity in the late nineteenth century prompted an impulse to uncover a repressed but prestigious history for the phenomenon, and therefore to locate proto-secularist tendencies – what Robertson calls the ‘primary capacity of man to doubt’ – within what would be conventionally understood as religious thinking (Robertson 1899: 5). It is also significant that Robertson’s quest for his intellectual precursors takes him so far beyond Western Europe and Christianity. He predictably espouses a version of the standard secularisation thesis – he imagines religion gradually ceding ground to enlightened rationalism – but without the cultural chauvinism often associated with that perspective: he argues that freethought is not the achievement of any one culture or race but the product of exchange between cultures (Robertson 1899: 90–1). Robertson’s argument that freethought is a fundamentally cosmopolitan phenomenon seems to index a growing awareness that secularism would need to account for itself in terms which extended beyond struggles against Christianity in the coming century. Tellingly, Robertson prefaces his book by disputing the old association of freethought with moral licence, particularly with sexual licence (Robertson 1899: 11–12). Although members of the Secularist movement had often denounced the identification of unbelief with libertinism as a mere libel, the movement was closely linked in the public imagination with sexual emancipation, especially with controversies over women’s rights and birth control. This was in part the legacy of the 1877 Knowlton affair, when Besant and Bradlaugh were tried on charges of obscenity for the publication of Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy, a Malthusian pamphlet which contained advice on birth control

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methods. Although Besant and Bradlaugh were acquitted on a technicality, the trial received considerable publicity and served to reinforce the equation of secularism with sexual radicalism. That there were some grains of truth in this equation was borne out at the fin de siècle with the emergence of the Legitimation League in 1893 and its journal, The Adult, in 1897. The League was largely formed by freethinkers, some of whom had been active Secularists, and it initially sought legal recognition for illegitimate children, but its charter soon broadened to ‘the advancement of freedom in sexual relationships’ and a ‘crusade against sex-enslavement’; The Adult ultimately proclaimed itself ‘a Journal of Sex’ and advocated ‘free thought and free love’ as well as women’s emancipation (quoted in Schwarz 2013: 195). The League and The Adult were critical of the extent to which the Secularist movement sought respectability by capitulating to Christian standards of sexual morality, though there were in fact many shades of opinion on this subject within the Secularist ranks. As Laura Schwarz has argued, the League and The Adult also help to clarify the often overlooked role that the Secularist movement and freethought philosophy more generally played within the emergence of sexual radicalism and certain strands of feminist thought in the late nineteenth century (Schwartz 2013: 207–8). The arrest in 1898 of George Bedborough, editor of the The Adult, on obscenity charges – he had been selling Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, part I of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897), which dealt with the subject of homosexuality (as discussed by Ina Linge in this volume) – served to unite the League and the Secularist movement around the cause of a free press. Many leading Secularists, including Bradlaugh Bonner, Holyoake and Robertson, rallied to the support of Bedborough and the League, and ironically proved more resolute in their defence of sexual freedom than Bedborough himself: he made a bargain with police and pleaded guilty to obscenity. Bedborough confessed, ‘I am a coward and I reverence more than ever the Bradlaughs and the Footes who have conquered where I have succumbed’ (quoted in Royle 1980: 277). The Secularists showed solidarity with Bedborough not simply because of a general commitment to liberty of the press, but because they recognised that the legal and cultural distinctions between blasphemy and obscenity were unstable: as Marsh writes, ‘so closely connected the two crimes of blasphemy and obscenity become [by the 1880s], that concepts which grew up around the one crime could shift with slippery ease to the other’ (Marsh 1998: 209).

Fin de Siècle Naturalism and the Crisis-of-Faith Bildungsroman Gissing’s Born in Exile (1892) and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) may be read as efforts to update the Victorian crisis-of-faith Bildungsroman, a subgenre inaugurated by Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1836) and which continued to flourish through the closing decades of the century. Mary Augusta Ward’s bestselling Robert Elsmere (1888) is often considered the quintessential example of the genre, although Oscar Wilde’s mockery of it in his 1889 essay ‘The Decay of Lying’ suggests that Ward’s treatment of religious doubt could seem stale at the fin de siècle: As a statement of the problems that confront the earnest Christian it is ridiculous and antiquated. . . . Nor could anything be less impressive than the unfortunate hero gravely heralding a dawn that rose long ago, and so completely missing its significance that he proposes to carry on the business of the old firm under the new name. (Wilde [1889] 2007: 80–1)

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Like George Eliot’s novels, Robert Elsmere sought to reassure doubtful readers that Christian emotion and ethics remain tenable in the absence of orthodox faith. Significantly, Wilde – or at least one of his spokesmen in the essay, Cyril – asserts his modern sophistication by pouring scorn on this kind of secular humanism. Although Cyril does not deign to spell out the ‘significance’ that Elsmere has failed to grasp, Wilde, like Nietzsche, suggests that the loss of conventional Christian belief changes everything; it demands a radical revaluation of all values and a willingness to reckon with the implications of philosophical relativism, a willingness on exuberant display throughout ‘The Decay of Lying’. Yet as Christopher Herbert has shown, relativism was not only a philosophy for self-consciously avant-garde spirits like Wilde and Nietzsche at the fin de siècle: it had a wide currency in late nineteenth-century intellectual culture. The principle of twofold relativity – objects cannot be known absolutely, but only in relation to one another and in relation to the position of the knower – was a key theme in the work of a wide range of late nineteenth-century theologians, scientists and political theorists. The relativity principle loomed particularly large in debates over the nature of religious belief: it was deployed on the one hand by conservative thinkers such as Arthur Balfour and H. L. Mansel to defend Christian orthodoxy, and on the other by agnostics and secularists wishing to assert the futility of theological speculation. Despite its pervasiveness as a theme and an argumentative strategy in Victorian intellectual life, however, relativism (much like the atheism with which it was often equated) retained its ancient associations with depravity and social disorder. As Herbert writes: If truth should be robbed of its absolute monopoly and exclusivity, cry out a host of writers, then nihilism reigns in the form of the ‘doctrine that all views are equally good’, nothing can be believed, and the world is plunged into the ‘abyss’ of meaninglessness . . . Such questions are injected with increasing distinctness into the Victorian intellectual arena. (Herbert 2001: 63–4) Gissing’s Born in Exile and Hardy’s Jude are both notable for the audacity with which they confront the nihilistic ‘abyss’ that may lie on the other side of religious doubt. Although both suggest the emancipatory potential of losing one’s religion, they are overwhelmingly novels of rage, nausea and despair. In this, they arguably return the crisis-of-faith novel to the Sturm und Drang of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, in which the protagonist famously imagines atheism as a dire negation of all value: ‘an everlasting nay’ that would reduce life to ‘one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb’ (Carlyle 1987: 127). Yet Born in Exile and Jude are also self-consciously novels of the fin de siècle insofar as they are determined to strip away the polite discourses of nostalgia and accommodation that had made religious doubt expressible in mid-Victorian literature. Both novels present the dilemma of the high Victorian crisis of faith in inverted form: where the archetypal Victorian doubter struggled to maintain the faith of his childhood in the face of his education and his exposure to modern thought, Gissing’s Godwin Peak and Hardy’s Jude Fawley struggle to banish the influence of Christianity, which haunts them precisely because of their intellectual aspirations. The hero, or anti-hero, of each novel is a lowerclass boy who hopes to use education as a means of social advancement, but finds himself side-tracked because education remains entangled with the mystique of Christianity in late Victorian England, despite the partial secularisation of the education system.8

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It is often noted that Jude is an anti-Bildungsroman, and this is an equally apt characterisation of Born in Exile: both novels continuously invoke only to debunk an optimistic narrative of education and self-improvement. Gissing’s Godwin Peak, an atheist and malcontent intellectual, falls in love with Sidwell Warricombe, the daughter of a doubt-ridden Anglican clergyman, and insinuates himself into her father’s graces by passing himself off as an orthodox believer. Godwin justifies his fraud to himself on the grounds that the church is riddled with sceptics and opportunists anyway, and that Anglican orthodoxy circulates less as authentic faith than as cultural capital in late Victorian England. To a large extent, the novel affirms Godwin’s jaundiced view: he excels at the ‘pious jugglery’ (Gissing 1993: 94) required of him in his new persona as Christian apologist as if it were a competitive examination of the kind he excelled in as a scholarship boy at his provincial college. Throughout the narrative, Gissing highlights the ironies that attend the interplay between religious and class positions in late Victorian England. Peak’s real intellectual sympathies lie with the Secularist movement and he writes ‘savage’ articles for one of its papers anonymously, but he nonetheless despises ‘street corner rationalism’ and shrinks from contact with ‘artisan freethinkers’ (Gissing 1993: 103, 98, 103). This is not simply because Godwin is a snob or a social climber, but because his atheism pulls him in contradictory directions. On the one hand, it is the basis of his intellectual vanity: he prides himself on his ‘truth-fronting intellect’, his ‘scorn of the credulous mob’ (Gissing 1993: 147). And yet his vision of himself as a kind of Nietzschean superman – he regards himself as an ‘aristocrat of nature’s own making’ with his own criterion of right and wrong – is precisely what makes him feel entitled to ‘the atmosphere of refinement’ he associates with the Anglican church (Gissing 1993: 30, 147, 138). On a more philosophical level, Born in Exile is an exploration of the premise that religious scepticism entails ethical relativism. Godwin reasons that, without God, there is no foundation for truth or morality, and therefore no reason to be honest about his atheism. He asks, Honest? Who is or can be honest? Who truly declares himself? When a man has learnt that truth is indeterminable, how is it more moral to go about crying that you don’t believe a certain dogma than to concede that the dogma may be possibly true? (Gissing 1993: 158) And yet Godwin’s fraud plagues him with guilt and self-loathing. Gissing frames this in the hereditarian terms of literary naturalism: Godwin’s compulsion towards honesty is an ‘ancestral vice in his blood’, a reversion to the ‘grovelling’ humility of his ‘long line of base-born predecessors’ (Gissing 1993: 147). We learn early in the novel that Godwin’s father was a freethinking radical but also a man of puritan conscience, committed to ideals of honesty and simplicity to the point of his family’s financial ruin (Gissing 1993: 20–2). It is this lower-class, Evangelical morality that persists in Godwin, too, despite his having been raised as a freethinker. (Godwin’s pious-sounding name, his father’s tribute to the freethinker and radical William Godwin, also hints at the potentially ironic consequences of such an upbringing.) As Frank Turner has observed, the mid-Victorian crisis of faith and its earnest model of religious doubt may be understood as the ironic effect of the high premium that Evangelical Christianity placed upon sincerity: if absolute belief is impossible,

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I must proclaim my doubt, whatever the social penalty (Turner 1990: 9–36). Erdozain has recently developed this argument further, claiming that the Victorian crisis of faith was primarily an ethical rather than an intellectual revolt against Christianity, and that its dynamic can be understood in part as the Evangelical conscience turning its rigours upon religion itself: ‘Evangelicalism created the “eternal microscope” of the Victorian conscience before succumbing to its exacting scrutiny’ (Erdozain 2015: 197). Gissing encourages us to feel considerable sympathy with Godwin’s effort to escape this puritan model of unbelief, particularly because of its class implications: in the world of this novel, genteel Anglicans such as Martin Warricombe and the Rev. Bruno Chilvers have the luxury of doubt and prevarication on religious questions, whereas lower-class men like Godwin are expected to hold themselves to puritan standards of candour and self-consistency. At the same time, however, the fact that Godwin cannot free himself from his puritan conscience does not seem fully explicable in broad sociological terms, as an effect of late Victorian class or religious hypocrisy. The psychological dimensions of his predicament are highlighted by the fact that his imposture turns out to have been unnecessary: Sidwell proves something of a new woman, receptive to rationalist argument and free of class prejudice. In this, the novel measures quite precisely the distance between mid-Victorian and fin-de-siècle attitudes to unbelief. Godwin turns out to have misread his cultural moment: his alienation is a product of his outdated assumption that unbelief is the exclusive province of upper-class men, as well as of his equally outdated assumption that he needed to cultivate Sidwell’s father in order to court her. And yet Godwin’s alienation proves no more remediable for being out of date: he dies alone and ‘in exile’ (Gissing 1993: 416), unfulfilled both romantically and intellectually. Godwin’s intractable sense of wretchedness, his conviction that he is doomed to failure and disgrace, may be understood in the light of Pecora’s argument that the modern, apparently secular novels often revive religious doctrines associated with ‘Augustinian and Calvinist understandings of irreducible, ineradicable guilt and shame’ (Pecora 2015: 13). Pecora is writing in reference to modernist literature, but his suggestion that such theological motifs – particularly the Calvinist doctrine of predestination – persist in distorted form in apparently secular novels is also applicable to late nineteenth-century naturalist fiction such as Gissing’s. (Nick Freeman makes a similar observation in this volume, when he points to the ‘jarring juxtapositions’ found in Gissing’s depiction of London in The Nether World, where ‘religious festivals of the classical world’ are invoked only to be transmuted into contemporary ‘alcohol-fuelled brawls’.) If the Victorian realist novel is often understood as an implicitly secular form, then late nineteenth-century naturalist novels like Born in Exile and Jude appear programmatically secularist: they do not simply neglect theology in favour of worldly concerns, but aim to unmask the thoroughly materialistic determinants of identity. Yet one of the often-remarked paradoxes of literary naturalism is that its tendency towards a pessimistic determinism in its construction of characters, who often appear mere victims of biological heredity and social circumstance, can seem to evoke a ‘Calvinism without God’ (Sundquist 1982: 13). Although Godwin prides himself on his clear-eyed rationalism, his conviction that he is condemned to ‘exile’ and ‘miserable incompleteness’ seems finally in excess of the social injustices he is contending against, and registers as a quasi-secularised version of John Calvin’s doctrine of reprobation: that is, some people are predestined for damnation by God’s unfathomable will (Gissing 1993: 297). As Pecora suggests, the recurrence of such

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theological motifs in secular novels reveals that secularisation is a ‘wandering, errant process that often folds back on itself, producing not only the return in distorted form of something perhaps hastily repressed . . . but also a host of unintended consequences’ (Pecora 2015: 22). When the two protagonists of Jude, Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead, are hired to re-engrave the Ten Commandments in a church, Sue remarks to Jude: ‘It is droll, after all . . . that we two, of all people, with our queer history, should happen to be here doing this! You a reprobate, and I – in my condition’ (Hardy 1998: 303). Sue’s sense of the irony of their employment inheres not simply in the fact that she and Jude are both freethinkers, but in the fact that she is pregnant with Jude’s child out of wedlock and that, by the lights of conventional morality, she is thus a fallen woman and Jude her seducer. But Sue’s playful use of the term ‘reprobate’, with its dark theological resonance, captures the deeper logic of the novel: throughout, we are invited to understand Jude as a modern type of Job, marked out for suffering by a malign God or by some more vague, inimical principle in the universe, without being given a clear sense of how to interpret such quasi-theological gestures in relation to the novel’s realistnaturalist frame. The perception that there is something extravagant, even farcical, about Jude’s sufferings, and that this reflects some kind of perversity on the part of the author, was a central theme in the controversy that greeted the novel upon its first publication and remains a point of debate in contemporary criticism. Readerly incredulity tends to focus on the figure of Father Time, Jude’s suicidal/fratricidal child who is made to bear the allegorical freight of modernity’s nihilism, or, in the novel’s own phrase, ‘the coming universal wish not to live’ (Hardy 1998: 337). Like Gissing’s, Hardy’s work has clear affinities with the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, although the extent to which this is a result of direct influence is a matter of dispute.9 As Nicholas Shrimpton has argued, the philosophical pessimism associated with fin-de-siècle writers like Gissing and Hardy – too often dismissed as a mere temperamental bias towards gloom – ought to be recognised as a significant feature of the late Victorian intellectual landscape (Shrimpton 2007: 47). Indeed, the authority with which Hardy proposes that Jude’s and Sue’s despair of life, their perception that ‘all is trouble, adversity, and suffering’, and that it would be ‘better to be out of the world than in it’ (Hardy 1998: 333), is not peculiar to them but a gathering epochal sentiment – the novel is set in the 1860s – that suggests the extent to which pessimism constituted a ‘distinctive intellectual position’ at the fin de siècle (Shrimpton 2007: 42). As Shrimpton observes, this is not because large numbers of people read Schopenhauer attentively and were persuaded by his metaphysical claims, but his name nonetheless lent a sense of philosophical prestige to various forms of contemporary disillusionment (Shrimpton 2007: 55): a post-Darwinian apprehension of nature as blind struggle; a will to demystify romantic love as a mere biological imperative; and perhaps most importantly, a sense of an intolerable vacancy in a world without God. As is the case with Born in Exile, Jude’s pessimistic determinism arguably undermines the novel’s social critique: Jude seems a victim less of contingent social forces than of a sadistic providence, or perhaps, in somewhat more secular and Schopenhaurean terms, what Hardy elsewhere referred to as ‘the Immanent Will’ (‘an indifferent unconscious force at the back of things that “neither good nor evil knows” ’).10 On the other hand, the novel’s dense web of symbol and allusion, which encourages us to read Jude and Sue through the prisms of both Christian theology and classical tragedy, makes vivid the

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sense of sacred authority invested in institutions such as Oxford University (named Christminster in the novel) and social conventions in the period. In other words, the novel’s political force may actually lie in its continuous suggestion that there is something more than secular at play in Jude’s and Sue’s ‘tragic doom’ (Hardy 1998: 283): it enables Hardy to convey the extent to which even self-consciously irreverent late Victorians continued to experience class identity and the institution of marriage as quasi-mystical in their binding power. It is possible to extract a conservative moral lesson from Jude: Jude and Sue stray outside the bounds of Christian belief and social custom in the hope of discovering a neo-pagan joy, but find only that they are ‘in a chaos of principle – groping in the dark’ (Hardy 1998: 327). Certainly the relentlessly chill, bleached atmosphere of the novel means that Sue’s invocations of ‘Greek joyousness’ (Hardy 1998: 297) register as sheer fantasy, whereas the punishments that Sue and Jude suffer for their transgressions – poverty, social ostracism, the deaths of their children, estrangement from one another, Jude’s death – are concrete and extreme. Yet the very extremity of their suffering also seems designed to shame any such moralistic reading; the reader is surely meant to feel with Sue when she says to Jude, ‘only the meanest souls in the world would blame you’ (Hardy 1998: 327). What is more, Hardy encourages us to feel that Jude and Sue suffer less for their freethinking radicalism than for their conventionally Christian qualities – their large capacities for pity and self-sacrifice; their propensity towards guilt and ‘self-harrowing moods’ (Hardy 1998: 324); and in Sue’s case, her intermittent sexual puritanism. Jude departs radically from mid-Victorian paradigms of religious doubt insofar as the animating question is not whether Christian morality can be preserved, but whether it can be exorcised. Although Hardy idealises some of the Christian qualities of the two characters (particularly in the case of Jude, who is sometimes presented as a Christ-like figure), the novel as a whole encourages us to feel that their tragedy lies in the extent to which Christian morality retains a perverse vitality for them. As Andrew Radford notes, the term ‘obscure’ refers not only to Jude’s lowly social origins and eventual failure, but to the tenebrous visual atmosphere of the novel – most scenes seem only half-lit – and to Hardy’s perception of Christianity as a spectral ‘survival’ in the modern world (Radford 2003: 185). Hardy was fascinated by the anthropologist Edward Tylor’s claim that modernity is striated with ‘survivals’ from more primitive stages of human culture (Tylor 1883: 70–159), and the iconoclastic force of Jude partly lies in its persistent suggestion that we understand Christianity in such terms, as among the ‘barbarous customs and superstitions’ that abide in spite of modern reason and at the cost of great ‘unhappiness’ (Hardy 1998: 215). Yet where Tylor’s theory of ‘survivals’ formed part of a basically teleological model of secularisation – he imagined a coherent movement from superstition to rationalism – Jude attests to Hardy’s keenly ironic sense of the ‘twists and paradoxes of secularisation’, to borrow Pecora’s phrase (Pecora 2006: 105). At one point in the novel, Sue quotes the notorious final lines of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s anti-Christian poem ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ (1866): ‘thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean: the world has grown grey from thy breath’ (Swinburne 2000: 57). Jude as a whole elaborates on Swinburne’s paradoxical view of Christianity as an etiolated yet nonetheless overwhelming force. The novel’s vision of Christminster/Oxford as a kind of medieval necropolis, made up of ‘decrepit and superseded chambers’ and inhabited by ‘fetischists and ghost-seers’, seems to convey the idea that Christianity is moribund (Hardy 1998: 79, 151). And yet the novel’s

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metaphorics of haunting also suggest the diffusive influence of Christian spirituality, so that the reader, with Sue and Jude, finds it difficult to determine if the events of the novel point to Christianity’s decline or its tenacity. The contradictory nature of Hardy’s representations of Christianity is still too often imputed to his personal ambivalence towards it, rather than recognised as a sophisticated effort to convey the ambiguous, fissured quality of Victorian secularisation. Hardy’s understanding of secularisation is captured in the ironic reversals of Jude’s and Sue’s religious positions: where she starts out the bold sceptic and he the pious idealist, their shared experience of tragedy alienates him from Christianity and draws her back towards it. Read allegorically, the fact that Sue and Jude switch positions but remain at odds also seems to convey a view of secularisation not as a progressive process but as a kind of vicious circle, with every effort to break with religion provoking an impulse to return to it.

Secularism and Enchantment Although Gissing’s Born in Exile and Hardy’s Jude both suggest the fractured, confusing nature of Victorian secularisation, they confirm the conventional understanding of the phenomenon in another sense: that is, the identification of secularisation with the ‘disenchantment of the world’. Gissing and Hardy would surely have assented to Max Weber’s famous argument in his 1918 lecture, ‘Science as a Vocation’: modern rationalism is fundamentally disillusioning, draining the world of meaning as it renders it calculable and masterable (Weber 2009: 139). In different ways, Hardy and Gissing also both confirm the Victorian archetype of the unbeliever as a figure of heroic despair, confronting the realities of a disenchanted universe with lonely stoicism. Taylor suggests that part of the prestige of modern unbelief actually lies in the strong ethical appeal of this vision (Taylor 2007: 588–9), and it was certainly crucial to the self-understanding of many late Victorian agnostics and Secularists. Dominant though it was, this was not the only model of secularisation circulating in late Victorian culture. In Jude, Sue links her unbelief with the neo-pagan aestheticism of Walter Pater and Swinburne.11 Although Sue’s invocations of joy, sensuality and self-fulfilment never seem more than wistful in the context of Hardy’s novel, they reflect the extent to which aestheticism provided late Victorians with a way of imagining human flourishing – and arguably even enchantment – in secular terms.12 Aestheticism is conventionally understood to give way to discourses of decadence at the fin de siècle and becomes associated with a return to religion, since a remarkable number of decadents and aesthetes converted to Roman Catholicism, while others, including Pater himself, drew ambiguous links between aestheticism and religious faith. Yet the religious and decadent modes of aestheticism which we associate with the fin de siècle remain engaged in a dialectic with the secular and hedonistic model of aestheticism most famously distilled in Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Rosamund Marriott Watson’s poem ‘Of the Earth, Earthy’ (1891) illustrates how aestheticism could serve as a language of secular affirmation at the fin de siècle. The poem explicitly renounces religious ideals (‘those dreams aforetime shown / Of whitewinged angels on a shining star’) in favour of the secular enchantment available in the modern city (Marriott Watson 1891: 1–2). The title refers to 1 Corinthians 15, in which St Paul draws a distinction between Adam and Christ: ‘the first man is of

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the earth, earthy: the second is the Lord from heaven’ (1 Cor. 15:47). In context, the allusion implies that the secular consciousness celebrated in the poem is not in fact exclusively modern but represents a return to a kind of primordial earthliness. As a whole, the poem affirms that the pleasures and pains of earthly life are self-sufficient and require no otherworldly redemption – a sentiment articulated in another of Marriott Watson’s poems, ‘Gloria Mundi’ (1895), which opens ‘Give us the earth’s whole heart but once to know, / . . . – so we at end may go / Into the starless night unmurmuring’ (Marriott Watson 1895: 32–3, ll. 1–3). Yet ‘Of the Earth, Earthy’ is also eager to offer redemption by other means. Immersion in the urban crowd is proposed as an alternative kind of immortality: the city embodies ‘the world’s invincible youth’ (8). By the final lines, the city actually promises to become an earthly paradise; if only we can accept the simple, secularist premise that ‘Life is life’s best boon’, then ‘every field shall bear fruit for our joy’ (22, 21). This life-for-life’s-sake logic echoes the art-for-art’s-sake credo of the aesthetes, and suggests a parallel between the capacity to appreciate art as an end in itself and the capacity to value life in purely secular terms. Significantly, this secular redemption is untethered from any particular subjectivity: it is a collective phenomenon, the spirit of the age or the spirit of the crowd. It is obtained by apprehending the city as an aesthetic totality, wherein the distinctions between beauty and grime, pleasure and suffering, are a matter of indifference: everything is consecrated by the same ‘golden lamplight’ (15) – a vision that can be usefully set alongside the rich variety of modes of representing urban space described earlier in this volume by Nick Freeman. In other words, the poem’s affirmation of a secular joie de vivre hinges upon the cultivation of the kind of aesthetic detachment advocated in Pater’s ‘Conclusion’. The plural voice of the poem takes an at once sensuous and disinterested pleasure in the spectacle of the city, attending to its unexpected formal harmonies and its ‘undefined and rare’ charm without inquiring after moral or spiritual significance (18). Marriott Watson projects a community or perhaps even an entire city of aesthetes and flâneurs, all reconciled to the secular flux of things and capable of appreciating the contradictions of modernity as if they constituted a work of art. A secular aestheticism here assumes the traditional burden of theodicy: it aims to reconcile us to apparent evils (‘squalor’ and ‘despair’) and to enable us to perceive the world as a redemptive whole (14, 13). Mathilde Blind’s epic poem The Ascent of Man (1889) also exemplifies how fin-desiècle secularists felt compelled to affirm the sufficiency of a closed immanent frame, to borrow Taylor’s formulation, and to write in praise of gloria mundi, or the glories of this world. The Ascent of Man has attracted scholarly attention in recent years for its attempt to make Darwinian theory the ground of a poetics of rapture (Rudy 2006). Blind’s poem usefully complicates the cliché that Darwinian evolution disenchanted the world for poets, and it was surely conceived in part as a response to Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), in which a scientific (though pre-Darwinian) vision of nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’ famously induces religious despair (Tennyson 2007: 399, LVI.15). Contemporaries remarked upon the novelty of Blind’s ebullient response to Darwin: The Ascent of Man is a hymn to religious ecstasy; for the scientific teaching of Darwin, to most people a very negative sort of gospel, inflamed her with the ardour of a worshipper; she believed it, by an act of faith, as the devout Christian believes in the mysteries of his church,

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Arthur Symons wrote (Symons 1897: v). Yet Blind was not unique among fin-de-siècle writers and thinkers in her urge to demonstrate that ‘religious ecstasy’ is possible for post-Darwinian atheists. Swinburne, a major influence upon Blind, spent the final stage of his career producing nature poetry which can often seem to shade into pantheism in its affirmations of the ‘joys of earth’.13 The mathematician and evolutionary naturalist W. K. Clifford, a friend of Blind’s, celebrated Swinburne’s poetry for its capacity to elicit what he termed ‘cosmic emotion’, by which he meant that it evoked a kind of atheistic sublime, and for demonstrating that belief in the ‘highest freedom’ and ‘the Spirit of Man’ were compatible with evolutionary science (Clifford 1877: 424–9). Similarly, the mathematician and philosopher of science Karl Pearson, also a friend of Blind’s, argued that freethought was, properly understood, an ‘essentially religious’ position, capable of inspiring ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘endless joy’ (Pearson 1888: 24, 25, 32). Although Blind’s reading of Darwin has been criticised for being falsely teleological (Holmes 2009: 54) – the poem arguably implies that Darwinian evolution guarantees moral and social progress – her effort to affirm a post-Darwinian enchantment is not glib or Panglossian. Indeed, the bulk of the poem is devoted to confronting the violence of Darwinian nature and the failure of human society to transcend such violence. The poem seeks to demonstrate how belief in the ‘ascent of man’, which here implies not only faith in human progress but a sense of sublime elevation or religious transcendence, remains viable after such knowledge. Blind’s first move in this direction is to suggest how evolutionary theory can generate the same sense of awe at human origins as the Biblical myth of divine creation ex nihilo: ‘Struck out of dim fluctuant forces and shock of electrical vapour / Repelled and attracted the atoms flashed mingling in union primeval / And over the face of the waters far heaving in limitless twilight / Auroral pulsations thrilled faintly’ (Blind 1889: 7; the ‘face of the waters’ echoes Genesis 1:2). Her second move is to glorify Man as Maker, the Homo faber topos common in humanist thought: the violent creativity of Darwinian nature is redeemed by the emergence of human creativity, or, in the terms of the poem, Man’s ‘shaping brain’, a ‘fiery furnace’ in which the world is ‘freshly wrought’ (25, 26). Blind’s debts to German idealism and romantic poetry, as well as her affinity with the culture of late Victorian aestheticism, are apparent in the salvific role she accords to art in her account of human history: The balm of Thought’s divine control And rapt absorption in the whole: Delivery in the realm of art Of the world-racked human heart – Forms and hues and sounds that make Life grow lovelier for their sake. (51) Blind’s characterisation of human thought as ‘divine’ is typical of her secularism, which is clearly influenced by the work of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Like Feuerbach’s, Blind’s pervasive use of Christian language and concepts is intended to reveal the extent to which the Christian God is an anthropomorphic projection, a displacement of humanity’s highest ideals (Feuerbach 1957: 17–18). This Feuerbachian logic meant that religious language and concepts remain usable for writers like Blind: it is not necessary to construct a new, wholly secular language or system of thought, only to disclose the emancipatory,

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humanist truths latent in Christianity. Thus Blind can conclude her Darwinist epic with an omniscient ‘Voice’ that speaks from the ‘peaks of time’ (107) and which makes the Christian-sounding promise that ‘From Man’s martyrdom in slow convulsion / Will be born the infinite goodness – Go’ (110). In other words, humanity will be redeemed when it discovers within itself the divine capacities it has projected onto God. Significantly, the godlike voice which issues this Feuerbachian prophecy appears to be a feminine creative principle: it claims that it ‘bore’ and nurtured humanity (108), and asserts that the ‘healing love of woman’ will ultimately ‘transfigure’ the horrors of nature and civilisation (109). This conclusion is prefigured by earlier suggestions that maternal care is the principle in Darwinian nature from which a humanitarian ethical code can be derived (14, 52, 82). (John Stokes’s chapter, which follows this, shows that at the fin de siècle the term ‘humanitarian’ was as complex and shifting as ‘secularism’.) Blind’s enthusiasm for evolutionary theory seems to arise in part from the scope she believed it afforded for reconceptualising both nature and human social arrangements in feminist terms. The Ascent of Man is an effort to write not simply a Darwinian epic but a freethinking epic. Blind provocatively undoes the common Victorian logic which opposed religious and scientific worldviews by paralleling the aimless violence of Darwinian nature with the ‘violent feud of clashing creeds’ (41) and ‘lurid universal night’ (40) that she suggests Christianity brought to the world: Christian civilisation and its ‘flame of mystical desires’ does not transcend animal nature but actually epitomises its worst tendencies, turning to ‘fury fiercer than a leopard’s’ (40). It has been suggested that Blind’s critique of Christianity is simply a critique of institutionalised religion (Guimarães 2011: 35), but it clearly extends beyond this: like Swinburne, Blind indicts Christianity for usurping a sensual, life-affirming paganism (‘a world . . . full of flower-hung shrines’ (37)) and for directing human desire towards heaven instead of ‘life’s delight’ (37). The continuities between the themes and rhetorical strategies of the organised Secularist movement and those of self-consciously radical aesthetes like Blind at the fin de siècle are apparent in the first section of the poem, ‘Chaunts of Life’. Blind there characterises religion as a primal form of oppression – ‘God sits enthroned and rules Man’s subject soul’ (27) – and celebrates the French Revolution as the first, heroic effort to declare men ‘free and equal – rid of king and priest’ (43). Swinburne and P. B. Shelley, both idolised by Blind, were the unofficial laureates of the Secularist movement, with their poems recited at meetings and frequently quoted in the freethought press (Marsh 1998: 173, 265–6). The self-conscious grandeur of The Ascent of Man, with its Darwinian creation narrative unfolded in Homeric hexameters and the oracular secularism of its conclusion, suggests that Blind envisioned it serving as a comparable poetic scripture in freethinking circles. As Herbert Tucker has noted, the perspective of The Ascent of Man is that of the ‘ecstatic overview’ (Tucker 2002: 37). Like Marriott Watson’s ‘Of the Earth, Earthy’, Blind aims to reconcile us to a secular understanding of existence by suggesting that we can experience a ‘rapt absorption in the whole’ if we identify ourselves with the universal or the collective. Yet the desire to affirm the rewards of a closed immanent frame could also inspire more modest and personal poems, such as Arthur Symons’s ‘Credo’ (1894), which was first published in the third volume of The Yellow Book and then served as the epilogue to Symons’s 1895 volume London Nights. Like a vast number of fin-de-siècle poems, ‘Credo’ reflects the influence of Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ and endorses a carpe diem ethic: given that life is brief and death final – ‘life, once lived, returns no

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more again’ – we must not ‘let slip / the wine of every moment’ and ought to embrace both ‘strenuous virtue and strenuous sin’ (Symons 1895: 104, ll. 16, 18–19, 12). Symons’s choice of title savours of irony – he surely intends us to register the religious connotations of the word ‘credo’ – but his libertine philosophy is avowed at least partly in earnest, and the poem reflects a wider tendency of late Victorian agnostics and secularists to set down their creedal commitments for the public. The essay, book or lecture which aims to justify one’s lack of belief and provide a sceptical version of John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) – his classic defence of his religious convictions and conversion to Roman Catholicism – constitutes a veritable subgenre at the fin de siècle, with contributions from both notable secularists (Edward Aveling’s The Creed of an Atheist (1881), Robert Blatchford’s God and My Neighbour (1903) and Holyoake’s English Secularism: A Confession of Belief (1896)) and prominent scientists and philosophers (Pearson’s The Ethic of Freethought (1888), Leslie Stephen’s An Agnostic’s Apology (1892) and Bertrand Russell’s ‘A Free Man’s Worship’ (1903)). Although such texts indicate a growing sense of intellectual authority on the part of secularists and agnostics, they also reflect the extent to which unbelievers continued to feel the need to cast their position in quasi-religious terms, as an earnest testament of faith. Most fin-de-siècle unbelievers would have passionately agreed with Wilde when he wrote in his own idiosyncratic contribution to the confessions-of-a-sceptic genre, De Profundis (1905): ‘When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who CANNOT believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless . . . Agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith’ (Wilde 2005: 98).

Notes 1. For a useful overview of the current secularisation debate in the fields of sociology and history, see Erdozain (2012); for an analysis of challenges to the secularisation thesis in relation to Victorian literature, see LaPorte (2013); and for critiques of secularism and secularity, see Asad (2003) and Connolly (2000). 2. See, for example, Blair (2012), Fisher (2012), McKelvy (2007), LaPorte (2011) and Vance (2013); Vance’s book also considers several late Victorian writers: Rider Haggard, Hardy and Ward. 3. For a full account of the philosophical background and social context of Huxley’s coinage, see Lightman (1987). 4. In addition to Asad (2003) and Viswanathan (1998), see Mahmood (2015). 5. For analysis of debates over the meaning of ‘agnosticism’ in the late Victorian periodical press, see Lyons (2015: 219–25). 6. For analysis of how ‘doubt’ gained respectability in the nineteenth century, see Lane (2011). 7. See anonymous reviews (1899a, 1899b) in The Athenaeum and Saturday Review. 8. As noted, religious tests were abolished for students at Oxford and Cambridge in 1854; the 1871 University Test Act opened fellowships at those universities to non-Anglicans. Non-sectarian colleges had been available in London from 1828, and the non-sectarian Owens College (now Manchester University), which Gissing attended and a fictionalised version of which appears in Born in Exile, was established in 1851. The 1870 Forster Education Act laid the groundwork for a non-sectarian system of national elementary schooling. 9. For analysis of the influence of Schopenhauer on Hardy, see Mallet (2009: 30–4); for Schopenhauer’s influence on Gissing, see Francis (1960: 53–63). 10. Quoted in Bownas (2016: 64).

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11. Sue’s desire to return to ‘Greek joyousness’ and ‘blind’ herself to the ‘sickness and sorrow’ she associates with Christianity recalls both Pater’s and Swinburne’s constructions of the distinction between Hellenism and Christianity; see Hardy (1998: 297) and Lyons (2015: 7–9 and 27–30). Sue also flaunts her unbelief by quoting Swinburne’s poetry; see Hardy (1998: 150, 96). 12. Other critics have argued, contra Weber’s thesis, that Victorian literature and culture demonstrate the possibility of secular enchantment; see Levine (2008) and Saler (2012). 13. The phrase is from Swinburne’s 1891 poem ‘A Nympholept’ (l. 237); Swinburne (1904).

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Hardy, T. ([1895] 1998), Jude the Obscure, ed. D. Taylor, London: Penguin. Herbert, C. (2001), Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hilton, B. (1988), The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holmes, J. (2009), Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Holyoake, G. J. (1896), English Secularism: A Confession of Belief, Chicago: Open Court. Lane, C. (2011), The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty, New Haven: Yale University Press. LaPorte, C. (2013), ‘Victorian Literature, Religion, and Secularisation’, Literature Compass, 10. 3: 277–87. LaPorte, C. (2011), Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Levine, G. (2008), Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lightman, B. (1987), The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lyons, S. (2015), Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt, and Secularisation, Oxford: Legenda. McKelvy, W. (2007), The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774–1880, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Mahmood, S. (2015), Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mallett, P. (2009), ‘Hardy and Philosophy’, in K. Wilson (ed.), A Companion to Thomas Hardy, London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 21–34. Marriott Watson, R. (1891), ‘Of the Earth, Earthy’, in R. Marriott Watson, A Summer Night and Other Poems, London: Metheun, pp. 8–9. Marriott Watson, R. (1895), ‘Gloria Mundi’, in R. Marriott Watson, Vespertilia and Other Verses, London: John Lane, pp. 32–3. Marsh, J. (1998), Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nash, D. (2010), ‘“The credulity of the public seems infinite”: Charles Bradlaugh, Public Biography, and the Battle for Narrative Supremacy in Fin de Siècle England’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 7. 2: 239–62. Owen, A. (2007), The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pearson, K. (1888), The Ethic of Freethought: A Selection of Essays and Lectures, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Pecora, V. P. (2015), Secularisation without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Pecora, V. P. (2006), Secularisation and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Radford, A. (2003), Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time, Aldershot: Ashgate. Rectenwald, M. (2016), Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion, and Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Robertson, J. M. (1899), A Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern, London: Swan Sonnenschein. Royle, E. (1980), Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1886–1915, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Rudy, J. R. (2006), ‘Rapturous Forms: Mathilde Blind’s Darwinian Poetics’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 34. 2: 443–59. Saler, M. (2012), As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwartz, L. (2013), Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion, and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shrimpton, N. (2007), ‘“Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist”: Pessimism and the English Fin de Siècle’, Yearbook of English Studies, 37. 1: 41–57. Sundquist, E. J. (1982), ‘Introduction’, in E. J. Sundquist (ed.), American Realism: New Essays, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 3–24. Swinburne, A. C. (2000), ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, in K. Haynes (ed.), Swinburne: Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon, London: Penguin, pp. 55–61. Swinburne, A. C. (1904), ‘A Nympholept’, in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, vol. VI, London: Chatto and Windus, pp. 127–40. Symons, A. (1897), ‘Introduction’, in A. Symons (ed.), Selected Poems of Mathilde Blind, London: T. Fisher Unwin, pp. v–vii. Symons, A. (1895), ‘Credo’, in A. Symons, London Nights, London: Leonard C. Smithers, p. 104. Taylor, C. (2007), A Secular Age, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tennyson, A. (2007), Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. C. Ricks, Harlow: Pearson and Longman. Tucker, H. (2002), ‘Epic’, in C. Cronin et al. (eds), A Companion to Victorian Poetry, London: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 25–41. Turner, F. (1990), ‘The Victorian Crisis of Faith and the Faith that Was Lost’, in R. J. Helmstadter and B. Lightman (eds), Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays in Continuity and Change in NineteenthCentury Religious Belief, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 9–36. Tylor, E. B. (1883), Primitive Culture, vol. 1, 3rd American edn, from 2nd English edn, New York: Henry Holt. Vance, N. (2013), Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God, Oxford: Oxford University Press Viswanathan, G. (1998), Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weber, M. (2009), ‘Science as a Vocation’, in M. Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London: Routledge, pp. 129–56. Wilde, O. ([1889] 2007), ‘The Decay of Lying’, in J. M. Guy (ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. IV, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 71–103. Wilde, O. ([1905] 2005) ‘De Profundis’, in I. Small (ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. II, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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7 The Claims of Kinship: Humanitarian Ideals at the Century’s End John Stokes

W

hen Charles Darwin proposed that the human species was descended from apes the reaction, although complex and protracted, was essentially twofold: first and most famously considerable affront at what was seen as an assault on the dignity of creatures made in God’s image and, second and more gradually, a counterrealisation: that the animal creation might as a consequence deserve equal respect to the human or, at the very least, that its status would need to be reconsidered. This was to become the basis of ‘humanitarian’, a term that in the later nineteenth century began to shed its earlier meaning that Christ’s nature was human rather than divine, and to emerge with greater prominence as an adjunct of ‘humane’. To behave ‘humanely’ meant to behave like a human in the best possible way – and for some people, the self-styled ‘humanitarians’ of the fin de siècle, this required being actively aware of the human in relation to the non-human. Human society and human conduct could only benefit from recognition of the species’ unique but integral place within nature as a whole.1 Darwin’s own later works – The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) – had themselves become increasingly preoccupied with the ways in which ‘man and beast’ might be comparable, and not only in terms of anatomy. It was a concern that he handed on to a younger scientific follower named George Romanes (1848–94). In public lectures delivered in the late 1870s Romanes claimed that since it was now clear that evolutionary processes determined the ways in which physical life adapted in response to environmental circumstances, it was reasonable to speculate that comparable processes might take place in the realm of the intellect and that there might be such a thing as ‘mental evolution’: in the now embryonic science of comparative psychology all the phenomena of mind as they occur in one animal would be almost destitute of scientific interest unless they admitted of being compared with the phenomena of mind as presented by other animals. (Romanes 1879: 151–2) Although he admitted that there was no exact correlation between anatomical and psychological development, Romanes’s personal observations had convinced him that there were indeed mental similarities between the species. Animal migration, for instance, although not yet fully understood, would seem to link the habits of wild creatures with the homing ‘instincts’ observed in domesticated dogs and horses.

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As Romanes explained it, so-called ‘instincts’ were the product of a number of factors: habit was certainly one, but the principle of adaptation was even more significant because it suggested that animals preserved and repeated the actions that were of most benefit to their well-being. As a consequence, ‘intelligent adjustment’ and the whole question of ‘mind’ could be linked to Herbert Spencer’s notion of ‘the survival of the fittest’ with its profound implications for human behaviour. Romanes could then go on to insist that ‘wide as is the difference between the mind of a man and the mind of a brute, we must remember that the question is one, not of degree, but of kind’ (159). And if the correspondence was true of intelligence then surely it applied equally to emotions. Romanes listed the feelings that animals, in his view, clearly shared with humans: ‘fear, affection, passionateness, pugnacity, jealousy, sympathy, pride, reverence, emulation, shame, hate, curiosity, revenge, cruelty, emotion of the ludicrous, and emotion of the beautiful’. The only exceptions were ‘those emotions which refer to religion and to the perception of the sublime’ (160). Even though Romanes believed that the similarities between human and animal were virtually self-evident, he did concede that proving the existence in animals of the ‘intellectual faculties’ that enabled them to operate might prove more difficult. It would be necessary to distinguish between habit and ‘rational actions’, the latter comprising ‘actions which are required to meet circumstances of comparatively rare occurrence in the life-history of the species, and which therefore can only be performed by a conscious effort of thought’ (163). In the end, Romanes concluded that although the ability to experience ‘thought’ might be shared with animals, its dominance remained the prerogative of humans. Respect for this relatively conventional view helped him to reach the conciliatory conclusion that acceptance of ‘mental evolution’ didn’t necessarily prevent belief in God (169–70). A follow-up book in 1882, Animal Intelligence, presented the fruit of Romanes’s accumulated research in detailed chapters that attempted to grade the presence of ‘mind’ in the various species, basing its findings on a distinction between ‘adaptive’ and ‘reflex’ actions. The criterion of ‘mind’ here was ‘[d]oes the organism learn to make new adjustments, or to modify old ones, in accordance with the results of its own individual experience?’ If Romanes could show that this was indeed the case, then it was clear that the cause could not simply be ‘reflex action’, since ‘it is impossible that heredity can have provided in advance for innovations upon or alterations of its machinery during the lifetime of a particular individual’ (Romanes 1882: 4–5). Chapters ranged from protozoa to ants and other insects, from rabbits, hares and beavers to elephants, finally to cats, dogs and monkeys. Overall Romanes decided that, according to his definition, animals did indeed perform ‘adaptive’ rather than simply ‘reflex’ actions – that is, they demonstrated the presence of ‘mind’, although the degree to which they did so depended on their place within the evolutionary scale, and the incidence of thought in animals was always less frequent than with humans. In Mental Evolution in Animals (1883) and Mental Evolution in Man (1888) Romanes went on to delve more deeply into the relation of evolution to consciousness and the vexed question of animal ‘reason’. Methodological objections to Romanes’s inferences were voiced immediately: his evidence was dismissed as ‘anecdotal’, as subjective, and his reports of individual animals were criticised as being, despite their range, effectively concentrated upon the so-called ‘higher’ species: dogs, horses, apes. He was said to be applying human

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norms to creatures whose living processes were very various. In short, he was said to be guilty of anthropomorphism. Prominent among the objectors were the psychologist and pioneer of behaviourism C. Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936) and the Darwinist biologist Thomas Huxley, the latter in his 1888 essay ‘The Struggle for Existence’ which insisted on the cultural separation of mankind from the animal kingdom. Huxley argued that human societies were attempts not so much to reflect as to overcome an evolutionary condition in which species competed for survival both within themselves and against each other. Humans were special. Nonetheless, largely because of increases in population, they invariably found themselves reverting to more primitive states. Any consideration of the human condition needed to acknowledge a doubleedged process whereby social activities remained part of ‘nature’. Nevertheless: it is convenient to distinguish those parts of nature in which man plays the part of immediate cause, as something apart; and, therefore, society, like art, is usefully to be considered as distinct from nature. It is the more desirable, and even necessary, to make this distinction, since society differs from nature in having a definite moral object; whence it comes about that the course shaped by the ethical man – the member of society or citizen – necessarily runs counter to that which the non-ethical man – the primitive savage, or man as a mere member of the animal kingdom – tends to adopt. The latter fights out the struggle for existence to the bitter end, and like any other animal; the former devotes his best energies to the object of setting limits to the struggle. In the cycle of phenomena presented by the life of man, the animal, no more moral end is discernible than in that presented by the lives of the wolf and the deer. (Huxley 1888: 165) Huxley was to take this inherently gloomy argument for human individualism further, and to make it even darker, with his famous Romanes lecture on ‘Evolution and Ethics’, delivered in 1893. It fell to those who valued the works of late Darwin and Romanes to prove their case by showing that the pessimistic theory of human regression as expounded by Huxley ignored the extent to which the collaborative social practices so greatly valued by humans already existed within the natural world – in ‘the lives of the wolf and the deer’ – and by proving that belief in ‘mental evolution’ was no sentimental delusion but could provide the foundation for a more complete awareness of universal life.2 ‘Humanitarianism’, as defined by Henry S. Salt, previously a master at Eton, in a pioneering article in the Westminster Review in 1889, offered itself as a set of ethical attitudes that combined scientific observation and discovery with principles at least as compelling as the orthodox religious beliefs that, in the modern age, had become untenable. Drawing on notions of ‘natural’ sympathy, humanitarians could agitate for equality and social improvement – for educational and prison reform, for example, and for feminism in its several guises. They were opposed to the kind of paternalistic philanthropy that Dickens, for instance, had loved to satirise earlier in the century, arguing on the basis of ‘nature’ rather than charity. In some respects they even endorsed the aspirations of aestheticism. Good works were to be carried out not solely for the benefit of others; individual satisfaction needed to play a part in the process. Although their beliefs may have fallen short of the hedonism proclaimed in his heyday by Oscar

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Wilde, the humanitarians were insistent that the goal was not only a more moral but a more beautiful world in which the creative arts might flourish. Coalescence into a formal organisation, the Humanitarian League, eventually took place in 1891 and was led by a handful of sympathetic personalities, among whom Salt was the most prominent. Some supporters were well known at the time, others more obscure, certainly today. They included Frances Power Cobbe, who worked on behalf of animals; George Ives, poet and penologist; Isabella Ford, trades unionist and suffragist; Lady Florence Dixie, explorer and champion of Irish Home Rule; Bernard Shaw, playwright; and Keir Hardie, Scottish socialist. The League could also count on occasional support from the novelists Thomas Hardy, W. H. Hudson, George Meredith and Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé) – and from the sexologist Havelock Ellis. Although, with the obvious exception of Shaw, few of the committed names have entered the literary canon, this doesn’t mean to say that they had no cultural impact. Throughout the fin de siècle, and after, humanitarians formed a powerful intellectual presence, at times operating as a pressure group. They became an active force capable of inspiring others: pro-vegetarian and anti-vivisection, pro-pacifism and antiimperialism, pro-sexual tolerance and anti-gender inequality, pro-prison reform and anti-corporal punishment. They hosted conferences, organised petitions and published a range of journals and pamphlets. Sometimes their influence was direct. George Ives encouraged Oscar Wilde to take a stand on behalf of persecuted homosexuals, while humanitarian pleas for prison reform offered a context for ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’; anti-vivisectionists encouraged H. G. Wells to reconsider the dangers of animal experimentation in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896);3 John Galsworthy was persuaded to make a dramatic protest against solitary confinement in his play Justice (1910); later on Harold J. Massingham campaigned against the use of exotic bird feathers in millinery, a cause that eventually won over Virginia Woolf.4 It was Salt, though, who had initially laid down the agenda for the Humanitarian League in his 1891 manifesto: The Humanitarian League has been established in the belief that the promulgation of a high and positive system of morality in the conduct of life, in all its aspects, is one of the greatest needs of the time. It will assert as the basis of that system an intelligible and consistent principle of humaneness, viz.: that it is iniquitous to inflict suffering, directly or indirectly, on any sentient being, except when self-defence or absolute necessity can be justly pleaded – the creed expressed by Wordsworth in his well-known lines, Never to blend our sorrow or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels This principle the Humanitarian League will apply and emphasise in those cases where it appears to be most flagrantly overlooked, and will protest not only against the cruelties inflicted by men on men, in the name of law, authority and conventional usage, but also (in accordance with the same sentiment of humanity) against the wanton ill-treatment of the lower animals. (Salt 1891: 89) It should be noted that the breadth of democratic principle advocated here distinguishes Salt from those who, though passionately on the side of animals, had been drawn in more religious directions, such as the spiritualist Anna Kingsford.5 Behind Salt’s

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humanitarian creed lay an impressive number of philosophical authorities and precursors, few of them Christian. Among those he could claim as precursors and pioneers were the Buddha, Pythagoras, Plutarch, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau and Shelley, as well as, more recently, Tolstoy and the Americans Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman. These enthusiasms were shared by Edward Carpenter, a fellow member of the League (Rowbotham 2008: 176–8, 251–2). Carpenter’s ethical commitments were exemplary. A vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist with a strong tendency towards pantheism, he was also a prophet of personal liberation who preached against egotism. Like many humanitarians Carpenter was subsequently accused of utopianism, yet he was a dedicated smallholder at his home near Sheffield and a supporter of local activities. As a socialist he had links to William Morris; as a sexual radical (and as noted in Ina Linge’s contribution to this volume), with Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner. At a time of legal and moral persecution he was remarkably frank about his homosexuality – although it’s true he did tend to exploit the oblique Whitmanesque language of ‘comradeship’. Carpenter’s fundamental principle was that ‘the spiritual must have the material to give it body; the material has no meaning without the spiritual’ (Rowbotham 2008: 2). Although a former Anglican curate, he was, like Salt, extremely well read in the Eastern religions, an admirer of the Bhagavad-Gita and of American Transcendentalism. All came together in his long poem Towards Democracy, which was first published in 1883 and subsequently revised; the ‘Complete Edition’, published in 1905 and regularly reprinted until the 1920s, runs to more than 500 pages. Drawing upon Biblical rhythms and organic images, the poem celebrates a set of beliefs that Carpenter had condensed from his wide reading (which included, as Linge notes, contemporary scientific works) and his commitment to the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamark (1744–1829), a pre-Darwinian theorist who had proposed that even in a state of decay organic life always contains within itself elements of renewal. Carpenter values ideas of ‘immanence’ and ‘exfoliation’ and there are many passages in which the poet seems to embody the universal principle of life within himself – which links him in turn with the creation as whole. So, for instance: The lion roaring in its den, and the polyp on the floor of the deep, the great deep itself, know ME. (Carpenter 1921: 108) Nothing escapes Carpenter’s vision: Behold the animals. There is not one but the human soul lurks within it, fulfilling its destiny as surely as within you. The elephant, the gnat floating warily towards its victim, the horse sleeping by stolen snatches in the hot field at the plough . . . Do you think that these are nothing more than what you see? Do you not know that your mother and your sister and your brother are among them? (174) Universalism could go no further. We can gain a more precise view of how the humanitarians in general went about addressing the issues that were listed by Salt in his manifesto and endorsed by Carpenter if we survey the articles that appeared in the two main journals of the League. Humanity was published between 1895 and 1902; renamed The Humanitarian it lasted until 1919.

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In 1900 Salt launched The Humane Review, which ran until 1910.6 The very first issue of Humanity contained, after an initial editorial, reports of a conference attended by the representatives of many charities and other associations, which had discussed the criminal code, public control of hospitals, prison conditions, procedures in slaughterhouses and cruel sports. Certain topics reappear throughout these journals with a dogged regularity. The relevance of some is quite obvious: the continuing and ultimately successful campaign against the Eton stag hounds, for example. Field sports, then as now, attracted an extremely emotional response. They included hare coursing, deer stalking, the pursuit of wild creatures such as otters and, of course, big game hunting. For humanitarians, committed to the idea of the unity of nature, any activity that derived pleasure from the suffering of others was deeply objectionable. The most fervent polemics were delivered by Florence Dixie, a particularly powerful opponent because as a young woman she had herself been a great enthusiast for the chase. Dixie’s accounts of animal suffering had all the recanting authority of a live witness.7 Vegetarianism was always of bedrock importance, with continual complaints that the methods of slaughter were themselves inhumane, let alone the consumption of animal flesh.8 Alongside vegetarianism there were the repeated attacks on vivisection. These followed on from the powerful interventions made earlier in the century by Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins and George Eliot. The humanitarian case was firmly against the practice in all its forms and tended to place the emphasis more upon matters of feeling rather than the validity, or otherwise, of scientific inquiry. This was, in many ways, a harking back to the precepts of Jeremy Bentham, who had proclaimed in the 1780s that the essential link between human and non-human was a capacity for suffering.9 For many years vaccination was almost as controversial as vivisection on the grounds that the process made use of animal matter. The mistreatment of living creatures for human entertainment and adornment attracted criticism for the basic humanitarian reason that once again human triviality was taking priority over animal dignity.10 The League also reached out to the other radical or progressive movements of the day as they grew in national significance and it deliberately set itself against complacent views of the past.11 Suffragette demands for the vote and protests against the conditions of working women were acknowledged,12 along with the ill-treatment of prisoners at home and abroad13 and the ‘scientific’ torture of the insane.14 The death penalty itself came under attack.15 Although many of its campaigns were local and quite specific the League benefited from the influence of international activists, in particular from two European originators of the political philosophy known as ‘anarchism’: the Russian exile Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) and a well-travelled Frenchman, Elisée Reclus (1830–1905). Kropotkin had attempted to answer Huxley in a number of articles published in the Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896, and these eventually formed the basis of Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid (1902), in which he argued that it was clear from observation that cooperation was a stronger force in the natural world than conflict and competition.16 Kropotkin started as a geographer, lived in Switzerland and Siberia, but made his home in England between the 1880s and 1917. Reclus was also, like Kropotkin, a geographer. A Frenchman who had fled to England as a political refugee in 1851 and then visited the United States, where he had witnessed slavery, on return to his native land he had become involved with the Paris

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Commune of 1871. Eventually he settled in Switzerland. His essays were translated and published in such prestigious English periodicals as the Contemporary Review and he spoke at meetings in London in the 1890s.17 Reclus’s basic theoretical position was that self-conscious interaction between humans and their environment would encourage participation in the stages of progressive evolution. Vegetarianism, once again, was a crucial element in this call for moral awakening, and a translation of his essay on the subject was published in The Humane Review in 1901 and later published as a pamphlet by the League.18 This opens with a highly dramatic description of an abattoir and continues with an account, based on personal memory, of the sufferings not only of a pig but of the pig-woman who loved the animal: The village crowd burst into the pigsty and dragged the beast to the slaughter place where all the apparatus of the deed stood waiting, whilst the unhappy dame sank down upon a stool weeping quiet tears. (Reclus 1901: 317) This was in line with Reclus’s philosophical belief, widely shared among other humanitarians, that the abuse of animals was invariably accompanied by the abuse of humans. The two were inseparable. Too often children were brought up to harden their hearts against an animal who ‘loves as we do, feels as we do, and, under our influence, progresses or retrogresses as we do’ (Reclus 1901: 318). Reclus was also inclusive in true humanitarian fashion in that he brought aesthetic considerations to bear upon ethical imperatives. The ill-treatment of animals, said Reclus, is made visibly evident in the effects that controlled breeding has upon actual appearance. So, for instance, pigs, sheep and oxen are turned into ‘an enormous ambulating mass of geometrical forms, as if designed beforehand for the knife of the butcher’ (Reclus 1901: 318). Butchers, in turn, ‘display before the eyes of the public, even in the most frequented streets, disjointed carcasses, gory lumps of meat, and think to conciliate our aestheticism by boldly decorating the flesh they hang out with garlands of roses!’ (319). ‘But it is not for us to found a new religion, and to hamper ourselves with a sectarian dogma’; Reclus insisted, ‘it is a question of making our existence as beautiful as possible, and in harmony, so far as in us lies, with the aesthetic conditions of our surroundings’ (322). The aesthetic argument was more than incidental: ‘Ugliness in persons, in deeds, in life, in surrounding Nature – this is our worst foe. Let us become beautiful ourselves, and let our life be beautiful’ (323). Vegetarianism consequently has the broadest possible political significance. Dead bodies are similar whether human or animal; war is merely a type of hunting, meat-eating a form of cannibalism. The horse and the cow, the rabbit and the cat, the deer and the hare, the pheasant and the lark, please us better as friends than as meat. We wish to preserve them either as respected fellow-workers, or simply as companions in the joy of life and friendship. (321) Reclus was even prepared to allow that performing animals in circuses and fairs ‘prove to us that rats, mice, guinea pigs and so many other little creatures, only desire to enter, with man, into the great kinship of gladness and kindness’ (Reclus 1906: 213). That may well seem a fanciful idea, although for humanitarians Reclus’s phrase ‘the great kinship’ was entirely familiar.

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In the early 1900s, for example, Carpenter also translated as ‘The Great Kinship’ an essay by Reclus that had been entitled in its original French ‘La grande famille’ (Rowbotham 2008: 252–3, 310). This summarising declaration makes no mention of Darwin or Darwinism but argues instead on the basis of a shared environment, now largely destroyed. Reclus mourns the loss of ‘the great reciprocal school of the primitive world’, a school in which ‘it is more often the animal that is the real teacher’ (Reclus 1906: 209), a fraternal association between humans and animals that live and learn together. Even in the present this could sometimes be glimpsed – among the desert Bedouins, for instance, who welcomed their horses into their tents along with their children (208). At some distant stage in human history such peaceful co-existence had been the norm. The natural sympathy existing between all these creatures harmonised them in a broad atmosphere of peace and love. The bird would come and perch on the hand of man, as he does even today on the horns of the bull, and the squirrel would frolic within arm’s reach of the field-worker or the shepherd. (208–9) Yet Reclus’s enemy wasn’t progress in itself so much as the piecemeal form that it invariably took. Admitting that ‘no progress can establish itself without a partial retrogression’, he would nevertheless like to see a world in which humans with all their intellectual refinement and breadth of knowledge would preserve their original intimacy with animals and with nature. Although the terms ‘kin’ and ‘kinship’ were employed continually by humanitarian writers, it was usually to indicate what they believed underlay the complex social systems and family structures studied by anthropologists. Even Reclus, for all his experience as a geographer, tended to be more concerned with a kind of biological globalisation. In its purely humanitarian sense ‘kinship’ encouraged and validated the use of anthropomorphic metaphors, a way of making suffering visible and sometimes audible, in as palpable a way as possible. When Florence Dixie attacked blood sports she didn’t hesitate to provide harrowing pictures to accompany her moral outrage. The hare is such a gentle, inoffensive, timid creature, that its torture is peculiarly repulsive and forbidding. A hunted hare is a pathetic object. The soft brown fur is bedraggled, the large lustrous eyes filled with terror and bewilderment, the sides of the animal heave up and down at a terrific pace . . . I know of no scream sadder or more pitiful than that of the hunted or coursed hare (unless it be that of the wounded roe) when the hounds or greyhounds close in upon and rend it. The sound itself proclaims the gentleness and helplessness of the animal that is being killed. (Dixie 1901: 20) Dixie’s choice of epithet draws upon long-established tropes which nevertheless provoke the question, raised by the anti-humanitarian lobby at the time, whether animals really can be said to be ‘gentle’ and ‘inoffensive’, or whether these are simply sentimental human terms imposed upon their natural behaviour.19 Anthropomorphic language not only risked the merely sensational, it also relied upon a brand of ‘totalisation’ – a serious philosophical defect in the eyes of today’s deconstructive philosophers. To totalise is to treat all phenomena in the same limiting way and to assume that everything can be known through a fixed language that is able to describe all manner

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of behaviour, including the non-human; indeed that there’s nothing that cannot be accounted for by and in language. At times humanitarian polemic undoubtedly fell into ‘totalising’ habits. In a double sense: it attempted to explain everything through notions of kinship which had a limited biological basis in those pre-genetic times and were obviously susceptible to sentimentality, and it had few qualms about anthropomorphic language. For responses to animal cruelty that accepted the material interconnectness of human and non-human lives without ignoring biological difference, we have to turn to more resourceful and imaginative writers than the polemicists. In the involved emotional structures of novels and poems we can sometimes find victimisers who are themselves victims, predators who are themselves prey, and a deeper appreciation of the unstable, problematic place of the human within a supposedly natural economy. Thomas Hardy, for instance, invariably acknowledges the social conditions that bring human and non-human life together. Early on in Jude the Obscure (1895) the young Jude is employed to scare off the birds: He sounded the clacker till his arm ached, and at length his heart grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should he frighten them away? They took upon them more and more the aspect of gentle friends and pensioners – the only friends he could claim as being in the least degree interested in him. (Hardy 1978a: 53) There’s no risk of sentimentality here, since the birds’ interest in Jude is obviously driven by their need to eat. Hardy shows animals, birds in particular, inhabiting the same landscape, experiencing the same weather and the same needs as humans. Sometimes, above all in his poetry, animals themselves give voice to shared but unequal circumstance: in ‘Bags of Meat’ a cattle auction is seen from the point of view of the cattle, who gaze at the bidders ‘with a much-amazed reproachful stare, / As at unnatural kin’ (Hardy 1978b: 807–8). At ‘A Sheep Fair’ it’s sheep: ‘Their shepherds reek against the rails, / The tied dogs soak with tucked in tails’ (731–2). In ‘The Mongrel’ a dog is drowned by his hard-pressed master, who can no longer afford to keep him: The faith that had shone in that mongrel’s eye That his owner would save him by and by Turned to much like a curse as he sank to die, And a loathing of mankind. (1978b: 877) Hardy wrote poems about hunting as a degrading upper-class spectacle and about ponies, war horses, rabbits, hares and squirrels. The voice of hope at the millennium in ‘Darkling Thrush’ is that of a bird, not of the human who observes it. In his ‘Apology’ to Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) Hardy speaks of the need to keep pain at a minimum for both ‘the human and the kindred animal races’, whether ‘tongued or dumb’ (557–8), and in 1924 he published a poem entitled ‘Compassion’ celebrating the centenary of the RSPCA (822–3). A late Victorian who survived, Thomas Hardy carried the humanitarian ethic through into the twentieth century, viewing human–animal relations with a sympathetic yet unclouded eye.

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While Hardy was the most consistent and probably the most concerned of the literary writers, he was not alone in representing the mutuality of suffering. Rather like the dog in Hardy’s ‘Mongrel’, the cab horse in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) suffers as a consequence of his owner’s own economic plight. When Stevie, the mentally challenged youth, instinctively protests on behalf of an ill-treated cab horse, Conrad’s narration makes it scrupulously clear that the driver, owner of the animal, is so brutalised by the economic conditions of his employment that he is in no position to treat the animal with due care. The misery is shared: by the abused youth, the exploited worker, and that other ‘mute dweller on the earth’, the horse itself (Conrad 1990: 128). This is a form of humanitarianism that incorporates the actual workings of human societies in its consideration of the relative claims of human/non-human animals. The humanitarians were nothing if not visionary – sometimes to the point of sounding apocalyptic – and second only to their claims for ‘kinship’ were their attacks on so-called ‘civilisation’. As Regenia Gagnier (2010) has recently demonstrated, the concept of ‘civilisation’ was one of the most common philosophical concerns of the day. Hostility to the modern world and fears of further decline and decay produced not only scientific dystopias but idealistic programmes for the future. Sometimes, as in the work of H. G. Wells, the two seem entwined. ‘Civilisation’ could be thought of as the preservation of individual autonomy in the face of a mass culture as well as the overcoming of ancient ‘primitive’ customs and their replacement by forms of modern rationality. If the decadents preached, and sometimes practised, an indulgent excess that would heal cultural failings through a kind of sensual homeopathy, humanitarians carried out a structural reversal in which a far-seeing minority would convert the so-called ‘civilised’ majority to their superior ways. Playing games with the usual terms, they took delight in inverting conventional relations between the progressive and the primitive, the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’. The very titles of some of Carpenter’s works, such as Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889) and Forecasts of the Coming Century (1897), display a typically millennial concern. Nevertheless, references to ‘savages’ were habitual even among the seemingly enlightened. Kropotkin’s admiring essay ‘Mutual Aid Among Savages’, which is about tribal life around the world, is a good example of the anomaly. It took Salt’s sense of irony to exploit the possibilities fully. When he came in 1921 to publish his autobiography, which was based on previously published pieces, he entitled it Seventy Years Among Savages in imitation of typical memoirs by jungle-braving, big-game-hunting colonial adventurers – but in the text he reversed the terms, making it clear that the savages were the white masters rather than the conquered peoples. In Salt’s scheme of things, the supposedly higher or ‘civilised’ groups aren’t nearly as superior as they think they are, the evidence being their practice of customs that are cruel, stupid and indiscriminate. Although humanitarianism usually presented itself as a matter of absolute principle, Salt, for one, was capable of admitting to certain vulnerabilities. In his 1889 missionary statement he had acknowledged that the origins of ‘compassion’, although he believed it to be an innate human quality, would always be debated; he allowed that human nature was complex and that cruelty and kindness could co-exist within the same individual. He had conceded that there were times when the exercise of compassion was impossible – though that only increased the need to act when no obvious

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barriers were present. At times a surprisingly witty writer, Salt always insisted that depriving oneself of intellectual engagement would negate the liberating benefits that one was striving to bring to others. The result could be the dull restrictiveness of Puritanism, the moral ‘earnestness’ that so vexed Oscar Wilde, and to which Salt himself was equally opposed.20 In fact, a strain of paradox lay hidden deeply within the humanitarian project. Blood sports were seen by their opponents as a cruel, ancient custom that had survived into the present despite claims that society was steadily advancing, so it made sense from the humanitarian point of view to describe their current practitioners as ‘barbarians’. Yet might not hopes for an improved society in the future, for a ‘simple life’, need to be based on previous, more ‘primitive’ models where hunting was fundamental to survival? Nor was humanitarianism entirely successful in eliminating all traces of evolutionary hierarchy. There is a bizarre but telling giveaway in the repeated attempts to force the London Zoo to stop allowing members of the general public to watch its captive snakes consume live prey.21 Why should this have caused such disquiet among humanitarians? Because on display was the suffering of ‘higher’ animals (in this case rodents) caused by ‘lower’ reptilian beasts. Even more seriously, given the seemingly undeniable fact that there were higher and lower species of animal, how to avoid acting as if there were inevitably higher and lower races of mankind? What if the high ideals of humanitarianism led its followers into unconsciously allying themselves with those who forced their own values on others, the strong continuing to impose on the weak? What if their superior moralising acted as an inadvertent aspect of imperialism? Might not their missionary zeal reinforce the very Eurocentrism that it sought to replace? It’s not always easy to reconcile the anti-imperialism of Carpenter, for one, with his patronising attitudes to other races. His poetry often relies on an uncomfortable mixture of universal aspiration and implicit racial discrimination. He was quite capable of composing lines such as these: The sun rises on hundreds of millions of human beings; the hemisphere of light follows the hemisphere of darkness, and a great wave of life rushes round the globe. The little pigmies stand on end (like iron filings under a magnet) and then they fall prone again. (Carpenter 1921: 173) Above all, how could one be certain that humanity was capable of collective progress given the shockingly contrary evidence of history, a grim record made even more dismally apparent in the early years of the new century and, in 1914, by a war fought, in Ezra Pound’s words ‘For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization’ (Pound 1952: 200)? While it was hardly surprising that members of the League should have been hostile to the Boer War when it broke out in 1899, the need to adopt pacifism as a fundamental way of life would always be a matter for debate.22 The League struggled to maintain coherence in the face of the divided allegiances provoked by the First World War, but finally came to an end in 1919. Carpenter was to live on until 1929, Salt until 1938, but by the 1920s the humanitarian impulse was fragmenting, dividing into organisations with a more specialised focus: a Canine Defence League had already been founded in 1891, the Performing Animals’ Defence League existed from 1914 until 1968, the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals was founded in 1917 and is still

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active today, as is the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports founded in 1925. Some prominent members of the Labour Party remained opposed to vivisection and concerned with animal welfare, but they failed to have much impact on official policy statements, and activism was confined to individuals or non-parliamentary organisations (Kean 1998: 132–5). What mattered now was less the recognition of universal ‘kinship’ than the alleviation of specific instances of ill-treatment, and involvement within the ideological politics of class conflict, colonial and racial oppression, and gender inequality. Although the anti-vivisection campaigns, often led by women, might have served as a way for women to protest incidentally against the violence directed against themselves (as was sometimes argued), animal causes and feminist protests were to develop in their own, largely separate, ways (Lansbury 1985). Despite the backlash brought on by the Wilde trials in 1895, ideas of sexuality were also undergoing radical revision – a celebration of sensual pleasure that, in the 1890s, sometimes went under the name of a ‘New Hedonism’ and drew on ideas of Greek culture that could now look idealistic at best. D. H. Lawrence’s agonised phallicism is only superficially reminiscent of the pantheistic euphoria that Carpenter indulged when he came up with lines such as these: I looked at the acorn buried in the earth, and lo! it divided and put forth two seedwings; and the embryo plant resembled the penis and dual testicles of man and the animals. (Carpenter 1921: 201) Increased familiarity with the ideas of Freud meant that such panegyrics to the polymorphous might well come to seem naive. Paradoxically, in their striving to maintain ethical absolutes, a total vision, the humanitarians had always risked becoming so marginalised that they could be dismissed as ineffectual ‘faddists’ or ‘cranks’. In a contrary move and early twentiethcentury reaction, susceptible intellectuals, swayed by the English Nietzscheanism that had originated in the 1890s but ripened in the Edwardian era, turned away from idealistic eccentricity and developed an interest in social engineering: might not ‘civilisation’ be either scientifically manufactured through eugenics, or politically achieved though Marxist revolution? Such disparate figures as W. B. Yeats and, in his later phase, Bernard Shaw would have little truck with the idea that ‘civilisation’ might be reconceived as universal harmony. Lawrence’s 1911 novel, The White Peacock, offers an essentially sympathetic portrait of a gamekeeper who believes ‘that all civilization was the painted fungus of rottenness. He hated any sign of culture’ (Lawrence 1983: 146) But Lawrence himself was not above castigating the kind of Englishman who ‘goes in for Humanitarianism and such like forms of not-being’ (Lawrence 1979: 504). It was no accident that the novelist should have been interested in gamekeepers who express their ‘kinship’ with animals by raising some species to be slaughtered in sport whilst destroying others as natural predators. Acknowledging that what we share with animals is a capacity for aggression could be seen as a terrifying but necessary, even cathartic, stage in the understanding of human behaviour. Faced with Conrad’s ‘the horror’, humanitarianism tried to cling on to what it believed to be moral verities, but in time the very word shifted its meaning. The first instance of what, sadly, has become the most familiar use of ‘humanitarian’, as designating ‘a situation which causes or involves (widespread) human suffering, esp. one

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which requires the provision of aid or support on a large scale’, dates, ominously enough, from 1933 (OED). It would take the realisation of imminent environmental catastrophe to reawaken the holistic vision of the fin de siècle in the early years of the twenty-first century. Yet that does indeed seem to be taking place. The same striving to recover a lost wholeness is expressed today in ecological and green campaigns and is apparent in the resurgence of nature writing, of eco-criticism, animal studies and the fierce debates about animal rights incorporated within literary texts such as the novels of J. M. Coetzee, the poetry of John Burnside, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida – post-Darwinists all. Like the humanitarians of the fin de siècle, many of today’s most urgent writers refuse to take it for granted that a natural balance can be achieved without reconsideration of what it means to be human, and continue to believe that some form of ‘kinship’ might be restored even at this late stage.

Notes 1. The OED entry for ‘humane’ states that although the word originally meant ‘civil, courteous, or obliging towards others’, it later came to mean ‘characterized by sympathy with and consideration for others; feeling or showing compassion towards humans or animals; benevolent, kind’. ‘Humanitarianism’ is defined as a kind of idealism: ‘Concerned with humanity as a whole; spec. seeking to promote human welfare as a primary or pre-eminent good; acting, or disposed to act, on this basis rather than for pragmatic or strategic reasons’. The first instance dates from 1844. 2. The ethical implications are closely connected with the philosophical (and psychological) questions of ‘altruism’ and ‘empathy’ that were much debated at the time; see Burdett (2011a; 2011b). 3. See the anonymous review of Wells, probably by Salt, ‘Mr. H. G. Wells’s Writings’, Humane Review, April 1900-January 1901: 277–81. 4. See, for example, Phillips (1900), Hudson (1900–1) and Buckland (1909); see also Doughty (1975) and Stein (2008). Protests against the fashion go back at least to the mid-1880s, when Oscar Wilde found himself in trouble as a result of having featured feathered hats in the pages of his magazine The Woman’s World. 5. For a highly ambivalent account of her life, presumably by Salt, see Salt (1909). 6. The renaming took place when a quite separate periodical entitled The Humanitarian (1892–1901), edited by the American advocate for female rights Victoria Woodhull, became defunct. Woodhull was resident in England from 1876 until her death in 1927, during which time she developed eugenic convictions that she shared with some of her contributors. Despite hostility between Salt and Woodhull there were inevitable overlaps. 7. For reports of Shaw and others speaking against cruelty in all its forms including sports see ‘Meeting’, Humanity, May 1895: 17–18. When the League succeeded in closing down the Royal Buckhounds, the novelists George Meredith and Thomas Hardy both wrote in with congratulations: ‘you make steps in our civilisation’ said Meredith; see ‘The Last of the Buckhounds’, Humanity, August 1901: 153–6. 8. See, for example, Cash (1907). 9. See, for example, Carpenter (1895; 1904) and Robertson (1903). 10. See ‘A Zoophilist at the Zoo’, Humanity, September 1895: 52–3. 11. See, for example, ‘Thoughts on the Jubilee’, Humanity, July 1897: 49–51. 12. See, for example, ‘The Woman’s Movement’ (report of a speech by Isabella Ford), Humanity, January 1899: 99–100; Ford (1901) and Clayton (1907).

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13. See ‘The Revival of the Inquisition’, Humanity, June 1897: 44, a report of the committee formed to protest against the torture of anarchist prisoners in Spain. Along with Carpenter, members included Walter Crane, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and the Rev. Stewart Headlam. 14. See, for example, Ouida (1897). 15. See, for example, Bonner (1903). 16. See ‘Mutual Aid Among Animals, 1’, Nineteenth Century, September 1890: 337–54; ‘Mutual Aid Among Animals, 2’, Nineteenth Century, November 1891: 669–719; ‘Mutual Aid Among Savages’, Nineteenth Century, April 1891: 538–59; ‘The Morality of Nature’, Nineteenth Century, March 1899: 407–26. 17. See Richard Heath’s obituary tribute, ‘Elisée Reclus’, Humane Review, October 1905: 128–42. Reclus attended an anarchist meeting at Holborn Town Hall on 28 July 1896. For his translated publications, see Reclus (1884; 1894; 1896). 18. See Reclus (1901); this piece was reprinted as a pamphlet by The Humanitarian League, Humane Diet Department, 53 Chancery Lane, London, 1901. 19. For opposition to humanitarianism see ‘The New Humanitarianism’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1898: 98–106 (repr. in Steevens 1900) and Salt’s reply (Salt 1898); for the Catholic position see Vaughan (1903) and subsequent discussion, and for a riposte, Chesterton (1906). 20. ‘Humanity and Art’, Humanity, September 1896: 145–6, presumably written by Salt, speaks of the need for artists to join with humanitarians and to campaign against all that threatens ‘the joy and beauty of life’. 21. See, for example, ‘Reptile Feeding at the “Zoo” ’, Humanity, October 1897: 77; Dickens had commented disapprovingly on the same spectacle as far back as 1857 – see Dickens (1995: 281). 22. Salt (1900) argues against the Boer War.

Works Cited Adams, C. J. and J. Donovan (1995), Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Durham: Duke University Press. Bonner, H. B. (1903), ‘The Death Penalty’, Humane Review, 4: 124–38. Buckland, J. (1909), ‘The Plumage Bill’, Humane Review, 10: 1–10. Burdett, C. (2011a), ‘Psychology/Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 12: 187–94. Burdett, C. (2011b) ‘Is Empathy the End of Sentimentality?’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 16. 1: 259–74. Carpenter, E. (1921), Towards Democracy, London: George Allen and Unwin. Carpenter, E. (1904), ‘Vivisection’, Humane Review, 4: 289–300. Carpenter, E. (ed.) (1897), Forecasts of the Coming Century, Manchester: Labour Press. Carpenter, E. (1895), ‘Vivisection and the Labour Movement’, Humanity, 9: 68–9. Carpenter, E. (1889), Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, London: Swan Sonnenschein. Cash, C. (1907), ‘The Abattoir Question’, Humane Review, 8: 75–84. Chesterton, G. K. (1906), ‘Mr. Chesterton’s Mountain’, Humane Review, 7: 84–8. Clark, J. R. and C. Martin (eds) (2004), Anarchy, Geography, Modernity. The Radical Thought of Elisée Reclus, Lanham: Lexington Books. Clayton, M. S. (1907), ‘Jottings in Jail: Extracts from the Diary of a Suffragist’, Humane Review, 8, July: 157–66. Conrad, J. ([1907] 1990), The Secret Agent, ed. B. Harkness and S. W. Reid, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Darwin, C. (1872), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London: John Murray. Darwin, C. (1871), The Descent of Man, London: John Murray. de Cyon, E. (1883), ‘The Anti-Vivisection Agitation’, Contemporary Review, 43l: 498–510. Dickens, C. (1995), The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. VIII, eds G. Storey and K. Tillotson, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dixie, Lady F. (1901), ‘The Mercilessness of “Sport” ’, Humane Review, 2: 16–25. Doughty, R. W. (1975), Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation: A Study in Nature Protection, London and Berkeley: University of California Press Ford, I. O. (1901), ‘Industrial Women and How to Help Them’, Humane Review, 2: 196–207. Gagnier, R. (2010), Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole. 1859–1920, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gandhi, L. (2006), Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Geddes, P. and J. A. Thomson (1898), The Evolution of Sex, London: Walter Scott. Hardy, T. ([1895] 1978a), Jude the Obscure, ed. C. H. Sisson, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hardy, T. (1978b), The Complete Poems, ed. J. Gibson, London: Macmillan. Hendrick, G. (1977), Henry Salt: Humanitarian Reformer and Man of Letters, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hendrick, G. and W. Hendrick (eds) (1989), The Savour of Salt: A Henry Salt Anthology, Fontwell: Centaur. Hudson, W. H. (1900–1), ‘The Feather-Fashion: A Last Word’, Humane Review, 1: 223–32 Humanitarian League (1897), Lectures by Various Authors, London: George Bell. Huxley, T. H. ([1893] 1989), Evolution and Ethics, ed. J. G. Paradis and G. C. Williams, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Huxley, T. H. (1888), ‘The Struggle for Existence: A Programme’, Nineteenth Century, 23: 161–80. Kean, H. (1998), Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800, London: Reaktion. Kropotkin, P. A. ([1902] 1972), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, ed. and intro. P. Avrich, London: Allen Lane. Kropotkin, P. A. (1899), Memoirs of a Revolutionist, London: Smith, Elder Lansbury, C. (1985), The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lawrence, D. H. ([1911] 1983), The White Peacock, ed. A. Robertson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1979), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 1, ed. J. T. Boulton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lloyd, B. (1921), The Great Kinship: An Anthology of Humanitarian Poetry, London: George Allen and Unwin. Lubbock, Sir J. (1888), On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals with Special Reference to Insects, Kegan Paul, Trench. Nowak, M. A. and S. Coakley (eds) (2013), Evolution, Games and God: The Principle of Cooperation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ouida (1897), ‘Scientific Torture of Lunatics’, Humanity, 2: 82–4. Phillips, Mrs E. (1900), ‘Murderous Millinery’, Humanity, 4: 69–71. Pound, E. (1952), ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)’, Personae, Collected Shorter Poems, London: Faber and Faber. Reclus, E. (1906), ‘The Great Kinship’, trans. E. Carpenter, Humane Review, 6: 206–14. Reclus, E. (1901), ‘On Vegetarianism’, Humane Review, 1: 316–24. Reclus, E. (1896), ‘The Progress of Mankind’, Contemporary Review, 70: 761–83. Reclus, E. (1894), ‘East and West’, Contemporary Review, 66: 475–87.

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Reclus, E. (1884), ‘Anarchy by an Anarchist’, Contemporary Review, 45: 627–41. Ritvo, H. (2010), Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Ritvo, H. (1987), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Robertson, J. M. (1903), ‘The Philosophy of Vivisection’, Humane Review, 4: 230–44 Romanes, G. J. (1888), Mental Evolution in Man, London: Kegan Paul, Trench. Romanes, G. J. (1883), Mental Evolution in Animals, London: Kegan Paul, Trench. Romanes, G. J. (1882), Animal Intelligence, London: Kegan Paul, Trench. Romanes, G. J. (1879), Animal Intelligence: A Lecture Delivered in the Hulme Town Hall, Manchester, March 12, 1879, Manchester and London: John Heywood. Rowbotham, S. (2008), Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, London: Verso. Salt, H. S. (1921), Seventy Years Among Savages, London: George Allen & Unwin. Salt, H. S. (1909), ‘Anna Kingsford’, Humane Review, 10: 58–64. Salt, H. S. (1900), ‘Militarism versus Humanitarianism’, Humanity, 4: 10–11 Salt, H. S. (1898), ‘The Old Brutality’, Humanity, 3: 12–13. Salt, H. S. (1891), Humanitarianism: Its General Principles and Progess, London: William Reeves. Salt, H. S. (1889), ‘Humanitarianism’, Westminster Review, 132: 74–91. Stein, S. A. (2008), Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce, New Haven: Yale University Press. Steevens, G. W. (1900), Things Seen, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons Turner, J. (1980), Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Vaughan, Mgr Canon J. S. (1903), ‘Cruelty to Animals and Theology: A Reply’, Humane Review, 4: 142–54 Weinbren, D. (1994), ‘Against all Cruelty: The Humanitarian League, 1891–1919’, History Workshop Journal, 38: 86–105. Wilson, D. H. (2015), The Welfare of Performing Animals: A Historical Perspective, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht and London: Springer.

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8 Information in the 1890s: Technological, Journalistic, Imperial, Occult Richard Menke

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ate Victorians could claim that their world was awash in more facts, more knowledge and more texts than ever before. Thanks to a century of media innovations – from the cylinder printing press, domestic (and later imperial) penny post, electric telegraph, photograph and chromolithograph, to the telephone, gramophone and cinematograph – they also created and encountered that material in an ever-greater variety of physical forms and social contexts. The situation required new practices and institutions such as network exchanges, news bureaus and modern offices, with their banks of typewriters and telephones. But it also called for new ways of understanding exactly what kind of thing was being generated, transmitted, processed and consumed so furiously, what was being transferred between one place and another or from one medium to the next. That is, the late nineteenth century helped generate not simply an unprecedented amount of information but also the idea of information itself. Some of the properties and dilemmas of late Victorian information anticipate later developments in the history and theory of information. But the state of information at the fin de siècle also reflected, and contributed to, specifically late Victorian discourses and concerns. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, argues the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, the meaning of the word information often remained closely tied to the verb inform, with its core idea of an item of knowledge given to a recipient by a source, of a specific transfer. This concrete sense of an act of informing co-existed with another sense of the word, no longer current today, in which information could refer to general instruction or Bildung; when Jane Austen writes of an educated man, a reader, as ‘a man of information’, she does not mean a man who knows a set of facts (Nunberg 1996: 113). Eventually, claims Nunberg, these two meanings – a particular act of informing and a sense of general, impersonal knowledge – help to generate a new, modern idea of information as ‘a kind of abstract stuff present in the world, disconnected from the situations that it is about’ (111). ‘By the century’s end’, argues Thomas Richards, ‘many people had stopped using the word “knowledge” ’, a term that presupposes a knower and that hints at ‘a prospective unity’, in favor of ‘the word “information”, with its contemporary overtones of scattered disjunct fragments of fact’ (Richards 1993: 5). At the end of the nineteenth century, this conception of information was still new, but already some central truisms about information had emerged: that it differed from knowledge by being broken, fragmented, disconnected from immediate experience; that it could move around the world without being fully tied to its material media

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or vehicles; that the amount of it was growing more rapidly than the human ability to make sense of it. Four domains of late Victorian culture drew particularly urgent attention to questions of the nature, circulation and uses of information, offering testing grounds for such general ideas. Most crucially, newly invented media technologies from the electric telegraph and telephone to cinema and wireless seemed to embody the multiplicity of information and the removal of texts and experiences from their original contexts. At the same time, the growing flood of books and the emergence of new forms of mass journalism could prompt worries about a world that seemed to be both recirculating information and drowning in it. Informatic connections between Britain and the empire confirmed the instrumental, political value of information networks, even while raising the possibility that reciprocal information about Britain itself might serve rival powers and foreign agendas. And cultural fascination with spirit mediums and telepathy came together with the idea of non-material information to suggest that even the occult realm might be another source of information transfers. Fin-de-siècle fears and fantasies about information often ranged a step ahead of the realities of information in everyday life. For this reason, imaginative literature offers some of the most illuminating responses to modern information. High technology and the spirit realm, the daily paper and imperial governance: these domains might seem disparate enough to epitomise the fragmentation and multiplicity of information, or even of culture itself, at the fin de siècle. (In this volume both Andrew Smith and Nick Freeman also reflect on fragmentation in relation, respectively, to the development of a distinct fin-de-siècle gothic aesthetic and to representations of the city.) But in fact these arenas could recombine with remarkable suggestiveness and flexibility. Virtually all of them come together in literary works such as Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Finest Story in the World’ or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, works that confirm the richness of the stories which writers could invent from the experiences, excitements and anxieties of information in the 1890s.

Inventing Information By 1893, in taking the phrase ‘many inventions’ from the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes as the title for his latest collection of short stories, Kipling both asserted his own authorial creativity and aligned it with the everyday technological marvels of the age itself. In the final third of the century, nineteenth-century capitalists, engineers, tinkerers and scientists invented not only particular technologies but also a more methodical approach to invention itself, as an aspect of what has often been called the second industrial revolution, which combined mass manufacturing with the systematic application of scientific discoveries to develop new products. Some of the most striking innovations of the era of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison were media inventions, from transoceanic telegraphy (including a cable across the Atlantic laid in 1866) and multiplex telegraphy allowing the transmission of multiple messages on the same line (1874), to the first commercially successful typewriter (1873), the telephone (1876), cylinder phonograph (1877), film camera (1885), linotype (1886), disc gramophone (1887), and even the early years of both cinema and wireless telegraphy (1890s). All of these inventions might be considered information technologies. But more than any other particular device, the nineteenth-century technology that had already

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begun to shape the emerging idea of information was the electric telegraph, simultaneously invented in the late 1830s by Samuel Morse in the United States and by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in England. Indeed, well into the twentieth century, Claude Shannon would turn to ‘teletype and telegraphy’ as a models for information theory in his epochal ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’ (Shannon 1948: 381). From its first appearance, the electric telegraph was hailed for its ability ‘to annihilate time and space’ (a much-used phrase that remained a familiar description at the end of the century).1 For the telegraph’s great innovation was to separate text from its material inscription, to liberate the circulation of the message from any physical messenger other than a pulsing electric current. Looking back on the nineteenth century as it drew to a close, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace identified this freeing of ‘communication’ from ‘locomotion’ as perhaps the defining technological advance of the entire era. By allowing near-instantaneous communication from one side of the globe to the other, ‘the electric telegraph serves us as a new sense’, Wallace concludes (Wallace 1898: 19). As a concept, ‘information’ is somewhat vague; it is hard to say what it looks like or how it works. Consequently, the idea of information tends to take on the material contours of the media associated with it: columns of printed statistics, the front page of a daily newspaper, typescript in a bureaucratic memo, messages on the telegraph. Electric telegraphy in particular encouraged the sense that technology could allow texts to free themselves of matter, geography, context and extra verbiage in order to achieve new speed and power, a view that helped shape the emerging idea of information. Furthermore, information also took on some of the traits that the Victorians ascribed to the specific scientific phenomenon behind the telegraph: electricity. By the fin de siècle, most writers no longer referred to electricity as a ‘spirit’, but even after years of both practical and theoretical research, the nature of electricity remained somehow mysterious. Although ‘electricity obeys the laws of a liquid’, wrote the great physicist Oliver Lodge in 1889, ‘it may be advisable carefully to guard oneself against . . . the notion’ that it actually is one (Lodge 1889: 12). Electricity seemed somehow ‘entangled’ with the still more puzzling luminiferous aether – a substance that provided the supposed medium for new experiments in wireless telegraphy, but one so enigmatic and rarefied that recent experiments suggested that it might not exist at all (19). Lodge firmly believed in the reality of the aether, but he conceded that even though it was ‘often called a fluid, or a liquid’ or alternatively ‘called a solid and . . . likened to a jelly’, ‘none of these names’ were especially helpful for describing this underlying substrate of the universe, ‘the one universal medium’ that contained everything else (339). At the turn of the century, the telegraph seemed like a device that allowed fragmented texts to move rapidly across the globe in the form of frictionless flows of a liquid-like substance through an imponderable medium. The mystico-scientific traits associated with electric messages could readily be passed to information itself. Indeed, the electrical or ethereal features of information accorded with its ability to move from one medium to another, to change its physical form and material properties dramatically while somehow maintaining its identity.2 The telegraph further highlighted the power of modern technologies to circulate words, data or sensations by removing them from their original places and contexts, an ability confirmed by new recording media from the photograph to the phonograph and cinema. The concept of information then

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provided a general term for the facts and discourses that seemed to circulate the world via an ever-growing variety of media. But giving human beings a new sense, technologically enlarging the collective sensorium via more streams of information, could have its downsides. Interviewing the Indian scientist Jagadish Chunder Bose about his efforts to produce and detect ‘vibrations of ether’ that could travel long distances and pass through solid objects – the phenomenon soon to be called radio waves – a journalist for Pearson’s Magazine worried about the implications of the new ‘electric eye’ that would let us see beyond the visual spectrum (Griffith 1896: 752, 754). More information, more kinds of information and more ways of acquiring, organising and transmitting it: all of this might even bring about the end of individual personhood. ‘We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other’, she concludes rather sensationally. At the very least, the march of information threatened private life with the prospect of ‘invisible eyes peeping at us from every corner, ready to note our every action, for ever tracking us down like sleuth hounds. An end to peace, rest, privacy, and all that makes home sacred’ (756). The heroine of Henry James’s novella In the Cage (1897) is a London telegraphist who finds that interpreting the cryptic, coded telegrams exchanged between her trysting customers temporarily makes up for the boredom and indignity of being a young working-class woman and a low-level operator in the late nineteenth century’s information economy. One person’s technologically expanded sensorium could mean another’s loss of privacy. Pearson’s misgivings about new information technology as a sleuth-hound able to trace out our most secret deeds may remind us what the greatest of fictional detectives owes to this fin-de-siècle regime of information. In the opening chapter of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–2), Holmes seems annoyed to be ranked as Europe’s secondgreatest expert on crime – after Alphonse Bertillon, the pioneering French police officer and criminologist who standardised mug-shot photography and developed some of the most influential biometric procedures for identifying criminals and analysing crime scenes. The abilities Arthur Conan Doyle gives to Sherlock Holmes reflect not simply some transcendent power of human reason but more specifically the power of both modern communication networks and an encyclopaedic approach to collecting even the most recondite information, those two sides of modern informatics. Holmes ‘has never been known to write where a telegram would serve’, embracing the speed and verbal efficiency of the nineteenth-century’s quintessential information system (Doyle 1891: 413). But he has also, famously, ‘written a little monograph on the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco’ (Doyle 1910: 639). Swift, terse, business-like telegrams unite with an expansive focus on a narrow, esoteric topic, with the collection, organisation and communication of fact beyond any particular or immediate use. And all of this proceeds for the sake of unveiling concealed truths: Sherlock Holmes epitomises the dynamics of modern information. Electric information technologies from the telegraph to wireless helped encourage the idea of information as a kind of weightless substance that could overcome the limits of space and time because it had transcended matter. But this notion of imponderable bits of information readily proliferating and traversing the globe also contributed to another idea about information: that there was so much of it, accreting ever more rapidly, that it was not only exceeding the ability of human beings to process it but also challenging existing institutions and media cultures. In the early years of

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Victoria’s reign, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge embodied the Whiggish assumption that distributing information as broadly as possible would automatically bring practical progress and even moral improvement. But by the turn of the century, the emphasis had shifted from the mere dissemination of knowledge to the management of information, amid worries that it might accumulate without control, with little regard to usefulness or relevance at all.

Books, News and Knowledge The rapid circulation of ethereal bits of information exacerbated worries about an oversupply of it. But these worries often focused on the distinctly material media of print and writing – legacy media forms that might now appear notably cumbrous. Statistics about the surge of textual production came to constitute a minor informatic subgenre in themselves. From 1840 to 1890, while the population of the United Kingdom increased from 26.5 million to 37.5 million, the number of letters handled by the Post Office soared from 169 million to 1,650 million annually – now in addition to 217 million postcards as well as 62.3 million telegrams (Mitchell 1988: 12–13, 563–4, 566). The vast growth in the sheer quantity of texts – from personal letters to published books, newspapers and journals – inspired both satisfaction at the march of learning and culture and a certain horror at what seemed like the fecundity of writing, print and information beyond use, if not quite beyond reckoning. In 1854, the British Museum owned 562,000 volumes, having received 19,578 new volumes that year.3 Forty years later, testifying in a case in which the Museum was sued for unknowingly including a couple of libellous volumes in its collection, a librarian noted that in 1893 the British Museum had received 95,000 books, or more than 317,000 items if ‘newspapers and music’, ‘&c.’ were included. ‘If all books received had to be examined for libel’, he calculated, ‘it would occupy 110 readers working every day except Sunday’ (The Publishers’ Circular, 3 March 1894: 236). In George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), the most famous novel about the late Victorian world of publishing and authorship, the overworked woman of letters Marian Yule epitomises the dread of the British Museum’s Reading Room as ‘the valley of the shadow of books’; ‘this huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print – how intolerably it weighed upon the spirit!’, she laments (Gissing 1993: 16, 107). Stuffed with more and more material, the great library becomes paradoxically empty, a wasteland, as it fills with ‘printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market’. As Marian views it, writing books has become merely a matter of rearranging what’s already there, making ‘new books out of those already existing, that yet newer books might in turn be made’. Momentarily misreading an advertisement for a book-holding device called a ‘Literary Machine’, she fantasises that ‘some Edison’ will soon invent a technology able to take old books and automatically ‘have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for to-day’s consumption’ (107). Marian Yule’s anxieties concern the proliferation of books as new publications are assembled from old ones. But within the novel, the publication that actually personifies the emergent state of print culture, the developments that make Gissing’s Grub Street new, is Chit-Chat, a fictionalised but easily recognisable version of George Newnes’s weekly newspaper Tit-Bits. Founded in 1881, the real-life Tit-Bits achieved

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an immense circulation thanks to its mixture of extracts reprinted from other newspapers and magazines, trivia items, advice columns, reader contests and gimmickry such as the Tit-Bits insurance scheme (a life insurance policy covering anyone who died in a railway accident while in possession of a current copy of the paper). As Gissing describes it, the paper is filled with ‘chit-chatty information – bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery’ (460). ‘No article’ in Chit-Chat may ‘measure more than two inches in length’, and even those two ‘inch[es] must be broken into at least two paragraphs’ (459). New Grub Street treats Chit-Chat as catnip for the ‘quarter-educated’, ‘the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention’ (460). But Newnes also collaborated with his friend the New Journalism pioneer W. T. Stead to found the Review of Reviews in 1890, a digest of summaries, extracts and tables of contents from current periodicals, and a journal that maintained much higher cultural pretensions than the breezy and populist Tit-Bits. ‘A paradigm of compilation, classification, and subediting’, the Review of Reviews treated print culture itself as something like an information flow to be sampled and summarised every month; Laurel Brake suggests that the journal’s features would have made it especially useful to other journalists – that is, to those who were reading today’s periodicals in order to write yet newer ones in turn (Brake 1988: 20). Like Tit-Bits, the Review breaks up texts and fragments readerly attention in the name of breadth and efficiency, both modelling and celebrating the practice of reading for information in a busy modern world. Chit-Chat’s conversion of every kind of content into atomised ‘bits’ makes clear the specific target of Gissing’s parody. But we can also note the word information as Gissing’s umbrella term for detached, arbitrarily juxtaposed fragments of narratives, numbers and humour. In the novel, the whole idea for Chit-Chat comes from a failed author who ends up writing ‘the general information column’ for its mediocre predecessor, Chat; ‘Would you be so good as to inform me, through the invaluable medium of your paper, what was the exact area devastated by the Great Fire of London – that kind of thing’ (260). But in Gissing’s description of the breezy, up-to-date Chit-Chat, information is hardly limited to objective fact. On the contrary, ‘information’ functions practically as a formal description: cutting up any texts so that they can circulate free from their original contexts and appear in new combinations makes them seem like information. This passage gives us a diagnosis for the dread that haunts Marian Yule at the ever-growing British Museum library: she sees books, too, as part of a new world of recirculated information. In one of its ‘Tit-Bits of General Information’, Tit-Bits fervidly reported in 1887 that ‘the British Museum Library is increasing at the rate of more than 100 volumes a day’ (Tit-Bits, 8 January 1887: 207). As we’ve seen, this was probably an underestimate. New Grub Street represents information as an oversupply of ‘bits’ of text or knowledge ready to be taken out of their original contexts for appropriation and reuse in a temporary medium, a treatment that aligns information with the fin de siècle’s explosion of newspaper and magazine publishing. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the abolition of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ and the growth of literacy had helped to expand the audience for periodicals dramatically. A print public sphere was growing into a full-blown mass media system. In the 1850s, Britain’s most popular daily newspapers had circulations of fewer than 5000 copies apiece, except for The Times’s 38,000; by 1900, the leading papers each sold more than 200,000

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copies a day (Chalaby 1998: 38). In 1871, the Daily Telegraph began publishing its average daily circulation each day, ‘something no newspaper in the past felt compelled to do’ – turning the popularity of the newspaper itself into a piece of minor information (38). At the same time, as the name of the Daily Telegraph suggests, the invention and adoption of new communication technologies was transforming newspapers and journalism: cylinder rotary presses speeded up newspaper printing by a factor of one thousand (42); features such as large headlines and illustrations, including reproductions of photographs, rendered the modern paper visually lively and eye-catching; telegraphs brought news from around the nation and soon from around the empire and the globe; wire services made an array of daily telegraph news uniformly available to metropolitan and provincial papers alike. These developments ensured that periodicals and journalism became crucial parts of the fin-de-siècle history of information. Telegraph news became particularly associated with the rising idea of journalistic objectivity. In 1894, a Times reporter was instructed that ‘telegraphs are for facts; appreciation and political comment can come by post’ (quoted in Stephens 1988: 258). In the early years of the network, the expense of telegrams might perhaps have meant that they had to be reserved for brief matters of fact, but the persistence of this association long afterwards suggests that a telegraphic dateline itself could imbue the news with a certain machinic neutrality and detachment, seeming to minimise the role of the writer who generated the text and the operators who transmitted and received it (Menke 2013: 66–8). In early nineteenth-century newspapers, the editorial writer had been king, but now technological and institutional changes dovetailed with the New Journalism’s ‘shift in emphasis from “views” to “news” ’ (Hampton 2004: 37). The rise of wire services such as Reuters and the Press Association meant that a wide range of newspapers received the same catalogues of global news every day – including papers that competed with one another for readers, and papers with widely different political orientations. Their communal use of the same basic reports on the same subjects at the same time helped confirm the sense of the daily news (especially foreign news, a Reuters speciality) as factual, general, neutral knowledge beyond ideology or individual perspective, as discrete items of fact from a long way off, as information. Synchronised to the march of the calendar, the news of the day conveyed the modern sense of what Stephen Kern has called a ‘thickened present’ full of information and significance (Kern 1983: 88). But while editors might welcome the opportunity to fill their paper with the wireservice material for which they were paying, they also fretted about publishing too much bland foreign news far removed from the lives of their readers. The informatic quality of the news thus helped inspire both the employment of special correspondents and the rise of the ‘human interest’ story. Originally associated with the American press, such emotion-laden reporting on individuals’ stories became an increasingly common, if controversial, component of British journalism from the 1880s onward (Weiner 2011: 156). Yet for newspapermen such as Alfred Harmsworth, founder and proprietor of the hugely popular Daily Mail (launched in 1896), emotional human-interest journalism could ultimately converge with a vision of newspapers as ‘news recording machines’ that offered ‘the world’s news in the form of a careful digest’ (quoted in Weiner 2011: 159). For Harmsworth, both approaches supported the goal of making news accessible and attractive to an ever wider public. They also represent two sides of journalism in an era of information: a backdrop of general, up-to-date knowledge of events counterpointed

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by language and content expressly intended to engage readers’ feelings and confirm the paper’s ‘empathy with the public’ (Bourne 1990: 31). Even detailed, factual news of far-off events could foster a sense of shared affective ties. During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the Daily Mail achieved record levels of circulation by combining extensive coverage of the war’s developments – ‘spending unstintingly on war correspondents and cables, on maps and interpretation in London, in order to get the latest news and make it comprehensible’ – with an aggressive, emotive affirmation of what the Mail called ‘the Imperial idea’ (Bourne 1990: 30; Thompson 1999: 12). With the push for an imperial penny post (introduced in 1898) and a comprehensive imperial telegraph system (the All Red Line was launched in 1902), that idea, too, was becoming bound up with the collection, movement and control of information.

Information and Empire Thanks to their very nature as transnational entities based on distributed forms of control, all empires, ancient and modern, have depended on systems of communication. The groundbreaking media theorist Harold Innis argued that this dependence tied empires to the abilities of particular media to work primarily across either time (as with ‘heavy’, ‘durable’ media such as ‘parchment, clay, and stone’) or space (the lighter and less robust ‘papyrus and paper’) (Innis 1950: 7). The adoption of new information technologies that promised to annihilate space and time, or at least to reorient them, would then change the ideology as well as the practice of empire. Communication networks were part of ‘the British Empire’s propaganda projecting itself as an empire based on Reason, Science, and Technology’ (Choudhury 2010: 3). But they also became a crucial component of the late nineteenth century’s New Imperialism, as the British Empire expanded these networks and systematically gathered and managed information in order to consolidate and enlarge its sphere of influence in India and elsewhere (79–82). Furthermore, in Aaron Worth’s convincing account, information technologies from the telegraph to wireless helped to ‘shap[e] the imperial visions of writers’ and others because they provided concrete ways to conceive of ‘colonial exploitation and influence’ (Worth 2014: 4). By the fin de siècle, the ‘problem of imperial control at a distance’ seemed to hinge on the control of information (Richards 1993: 6). Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) turns the pursuit of imperial information into a vivid adventure yarn and exemplifies the treatment of the British Empire as an informatic enterprise. Nearly the first thing we learn about the novel’s adolescent protagonist, the orphaned Kimball O’Hara, is that he ‘[i]s English’, a ‘Sahib’ in British India, but Indian-born and effortlessly fluent in the languages and mores of his native Lahore (Kipling 2011: 1). In fact, as the novel soon establishes, both of Kim’s parents were not English but Irish; even identity itself is a matter of codes and conventions. When the novel opens, Kim seems innocent of another, less readily observable network of codes and movements – the imperial information network that has come to intersect at countless points with the daily life of Kipling’s India: Kim did not suspect that Mahbub Ali, known as one of the best horse-dealers in the Punjab, . . . was registered in one of the locked books of the Indian Survey Department as C.25.1B. Twice or thrice yearly C.25 would send in a little story, baldly told but most interesting, and generally – it was checked by the statements of R.17

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and M.4 – quite true. It concerned all manner of out-of-the-way mountain principalities, explorers of nationalities other than English, and the gun-trade – was, in brief, a small portion of that vast mass of ‘information received’ on which the Indian Government acts. (18) Kipling gives us the sense of two systems here: the outward, social world of ordinary colonial life, and the covert world of imperial information. In the bureaucracy of the Indian Survey Department, personal names that are bound up with ethnicity, religion, region, language and gender turn into impersonal alphanumeric codes, while ‘interesting’ individual stories are aggregated, compared and assessed to become part of the mass of information that will be used to help govern the Indian landmass and the Indian masses. In the India and Tibet imagined by Kim, notes Richards, colonisation maintained by the open brutality of ‘ethnocide, deportation, and slavery’ is being superseded by colonisation via ‘the mediated instrumentality of information’ (Richards 1993: 23). At the outset of the novel, as Kim prepares to accompany an old Tibetan lama on his vague pilgrimage to find a holy river, he also undertakes the more specific commission of carrying a coded message from Mahbub Ali to an English intelligence officer. The ‘Great Game’ of imperial rivalry in Asia depends on the Russian and British Empires’ abilities to solicit, convey, process and act on information, as well as to interfere with the other side’s attempts to do the same (Kipling 2011: 105). Once Kim discovers that game, he longs to join it: ‘if only, like the Babu, he could enjoy the dignity of a letter and a number – and a price upon his head! Some day he would be all that and more’ (209–10). In keeping with Kipling’s twin fascinations with initiation and with cryptic masculine professional knowledge, the novel narrates Kim’s progress towards this ambition. With his talents for languages and his boyish love of disguise and mimicry, Kim easily takes on a variety of specific local identities, an invaluable talent for a colonial secret agent. But Kim’s ability to shed the material markers of origin and identity, his desire to attain the status of a letter and number, even his strategy of clearing his mind by thinking of ‘the multiplication-table in English’ – all of this suggests how Kim comes to offer a figure not simply for geopolitical gamesmanship or the craft of British domination but ultimately for imperial information (125). Like information itself, Kim gains power and utility from his apparent capacity to circulate by freeing himself from matter and context, even while maintaining his own identity. Contemplating his role and his sense of self, Kim reflects that the Great Game ‘runs like a shuttle throughout all Hind . . . [It is] a great and a wonderful world – and I am Kim – Kim – Kim – alone – one person – in the middle of it all’ (183). Kim’s ability to serve both the unworldly Teshoo Lama and the wily agents and officials of the British Empire confirms his ability to exist in multiple social realms, and to take on multiple cultural identities, at the same time. But, more audaciously, Kim’s double service also suggests that an understanding of the world as information could come to coincide with the lama’s spiritual view of ‘the Human World, busy and profitless’, as illusion. The lama draws the Wheel of Life, a visual allegory for the pettiness and deception of ordinary existence, but Kim realises that: by the roadside trundled the very Wheel itself, eating, drinking, trading, marrying, and quarrelling . . . Often the lama made the living pictures the matter of his text,

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bidding Kim – too ready – note how the flesh takes a thousand shapes, desirable or detestable as men reckon, but in truth of no account either way; and how the stupid spirit, bond-slave to the Hog, the Dove, and the Serpent . . . is bound to follow the body through all the Heavens and all the Hells, and strictly round again. (172) Holy enlightenment and imperial espionage may differ in virtually every other respect, but they agree on a view of ordinary daily life as something like ‘maya, illusion’ (8). Kim hints that information may even have its own covert theology, postulating an essence or spirit that might be unyoked from its slavery to the mere accidents of protean matter. In the final pages of the novel, the lama reports that he has at last found his river. Achieving a moment of transcendent perception, he seems to behold: all Hind, from Ceylon in the sea to the Hills, and my own Painted Rocks at Such-zen; I saw every camp and village, to the least, where we have ever rested. I saw them at one time and in one place; for they were within the Soul. By this I knew the Soul had passed beyond the illusion of Time and Space and of Things. (233) Overcoming the limits of matter, annihilating space and time, a mystical metaphysics comes to converge with the realpolitik of imperial knowledge over an entire region. In the lama’s vision, imperial India from Ceylon to Tibet, and all the action of this picaresque novel itself, appear laid out as an array of information.

Telepath Networks and Occult Information The development and spread of marvellous new information technologies inspired the idea of even more astonishing or mysterious modes of recording and communication. The telegraph and telephone transmitted live signals from distant places; in 1897, one first-time user of a ‘talkaphone’ described the experience as like ‘hearing a voice from another world’ (Fischer 1994: 62). Photography or phonography captured the sight or sound of a moment and set it down for the future in a form that both closely resembled life and clearly differed from it. Early motion picture technologies had begun to flash their flickering, ghostly scenes of the past in front of wondering audiences. Most recently, Wilhelm Röntgen’s 1895 discovery of X-rays had revealed the skeletons beneath the skin of the living (and, something that was nearly as disturbing, under their layers of clothing). Real technological developments could seem to point the way to more mystical forms of information transfer or more spectral modes of recording. By the turn of the century, information technologies emerged as systematic paradigms for psychic and occult experience. The coining of the word telepathy (1882) by the writer and psychic researcher Frederic Myers reflects this logic, combining a prefix associated with long-distance electrical signalling with a root signifying ‘feeling’. Other suggestions had included ‘ideoscopy’ and ‘telaesthesia’ (Luckhurst 2002: 70). From media to mediums: it’s as if thought transfer were just another new technology, complete with a name assembled from fragments of Greek. At the turn of the century, science was not always far from seance. Alfred Russel Wallace, who celebrated the century’s liberation of communication from material movement, tried to reconcile evolutionary theory with his turn to spiritualism. And Oliver Lodge wasn’t merely an eminent physicist and radio theorist but also a keen member of Myers’s Society for Psychical Research. (This mixing of the

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mystical and scientific is also a feature which Andrew Smith, in this volume, identifies with a fin-de-siècle gothic aesthetic.) In fact, Lodge viewed both wireless transmission and psychic communion with the spirits of the dead as forms of communication through the aether. Marie Corelli’s bestselling novels offer perhaps the most explicit application of psychic informatics to fiction. Her first book, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), tells the story of a heroine whose nervous collapse is resolved when a mysterious figure named Heliobas helps her discover the ‘Electric Creed’ or ‘Electric Principles of Christianity’. Early in the novel, the electric information network illustrates her mental disruption, the disturbance of the ‘electric wires on which run the messages of thought, impulse, affection, emotion’ (Corelli 2004: 38). But this idea later allows the novel to postulate electrical links from an individual nervous system to realms more distant than any physical connection could reach, as if by simply adding a new, long-distance wire to the telepath network: ‘Granting human electricity to exist, why should not a communication be established, like a sort of spiritual Atlantic cable, between man and the beings of other spheres and other solar systems?’ (114). Corelli also pursues the telepathic possibilities of electrical communication in related novels such as Ardath (1889) and The Soul of Lilith (1892). The Quarterly Review dismissed Corelli’s theology as mere ‘spiritualism somewhat diluted with electricity’ (Quarterly Review, 188, October 1898: 308). But – ever since the ghosts began rapping their messages shortly after Samuel Morse’s telegraphs did – real experiences of information technology had been entwined with spiritualism and with uncanny communication more generally (Sconce 2000). Another article in the same issue of the Quarterly finds an eerie but familiar precedent for Marconi’s recent work on wireless transmission in the ‘strange noises’ and ‘overheard conversations’ that telephone users often noted, the ghostly voices that already seemed to inhabit information technologies (Quarterly Review, 188, October 1898: 497). Spiritualism could mix with other modern vehicles of information as well. In 1893, W. T. Stead founded the magazine Borderland in order to provide ‘a medium of communication between the scientific expert’ in psychic phenomena ‘and the great mass of ordinary people’, to bring psychic research to the masses (quoted in Luckhurst 2002: 131). In other ways, too, the occult could converge with information technology, mediums with mass media, especially in the pages of imaginative literature. In Kipling’s ‘The Finest Story in the World’ (1891), a callow bank clerk named Charlie Mears unknowingly begins recalling fragments of experience from his soul’s past lives. The narrator, an older writer and friend of Charlie’s, hopes to set down those real recollections and publish them as the most vivid tale ever written, passing off truthful, if preternatural, information as a bold work of fiction. The difficulty is to tap into those recorded memories and replay them for transcription – especially given the interference the narrator faces as a result of Charlie’s own encounters with fin-de-siècle mass print forms. While the narrator fantasises about literary renown, Charlie’s great dream is to send an essay on bank clerks to ‘Tit-Bits, and get the guinea prize’ for the week’s best contribution (Kipling 1899: 143). After buying cheap editions of off-copyright romantic poetry, Charlie arrives ‘as useless as a surcharged phonograph – drunk on Byron, Shelley, or Keats’; their texts combine with Charlie’s authentic memories, turning his talk into ‘a confused tangle of other voices most like the mutter and hum through a

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City telephone’ (119, 120). Information, as scraps of knowledge that overcome space and time, provides Kipling with a paradigm for paranormal mental experience. But as mass print impinges on Charlie’s consciousness, Kipling treats the psyche as an overtaxed modern information technology. Like ‘The Finest Story in the World’, Dracula (1897) epitomises the way that imaginative texts could bring together the many sides of information at the fin de siècle. As readers have noted since its publication, Stoker’s novel obsessively draws attention to the late Victorian information ecology via the real information technologies and media that furnish its fictitious sources of documentation. A dossier of fictitious shorthand journal entries, letters, telegrams, invoice slips, imaginary human interest articles in newspapers both real and imaginary, ‘phonograph diaries, typewrit[ing], and so on’ documents the predations of the count and the operations of the vampire hunters – each textual morsel docketed with its date and original source (Spectator 79, 31 July 1897: 150). In the novel’s fiction of itself, this collection is supposed to have provided the raw material for the conventional-looking printed book at hand. From its opening sentence, Dracula presents itself as less the story of the defeat of the vampire than that of the assembly of the documents that are supposed to compose it: ‘How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made clear in the reading of them’ (Stoker 2011: 4). As if echoing the novel’s own preoccupation with inscription and recording, most of its living human characters are keen writers or record keepers. In the first sections of the novel, several of them inadvertently begin to document their encounters with Dracula and his plots as part of their everyday activities of communication and recording. The young lawyer Jonathan Harker keeps a journal to practice shorthand; his fiancée Mina Miller not only does the same but also learns typewriting and conducts interviews in imitation of ‘lady journalists’; Dr John Seward uses a wax-cylinder phonograph to record a diary that mixes personal reflections with notes on patients in the insane asylum he oversees (53). ‘Let all be put down exactly’, Seward gratuitously commands the phonograph to which he speaks; his injunction, echoed by other characters in various media, aptly summarises the novel’s recurrent focus on accurate transcription (125). High technology and journalism come together with the imperial possibilities of information in a novel that has been read as one of the great narratives of ‘reverse colonisation’, the late Victorian fantasy that ‘racial enervation’ and ‘imperial decay’ at home in Britain were somehow opening up the metropole to invasion by primitive, atavistic forces from distant lands (Arata 1990: 629). Visiting the Count in Castle Dracula, Jonathan discovers that this foreign nobleman in far-off Transylvania has assembled his own ‘library’ of works about England: a vast number of English books, whole shelves full of them, and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers . . . The books were of the most varied kind – history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law – all relating to England and English life and customs and manners. (Stoker 2011: 22) Jonathan’s catalogue includes no mention of fiction or poetry. Rather, he particularly notices the ‘books of reference . . . the London Directory, the “Red” and “Blue” books [government rosters and parliamentary reports], Whitaker’s Almanac, the Army and Navy Lists, and – it somehow gladdened my heart to see it – the Law List’ (22). Soon

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afterwards, Jonathan finds Dracula himself ‘lying on the sofa, reading, of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw’s Guide’, a manual of railway routes and schedules (24). Bradshaw’s Guide recasts the physical circulation of persons and machines into hundreds of pages of tables, arrays of names and numbers in small type that give the impression of pure information in printed form. The book makes for rather bloodless pleasure reading, but it provides helpful knowledge for a vampire planning an invasion – or for a heroine who seeks to repel it. In an eerie if unremarked symmetry, Mina herself turns out to be a self-described ‘train fiend’ who enjoys memorising railway schedules just in case such knowledge comes in handy later on (314). Dracula encapsulates turn-of-the-century anxieties about a range of sensational topics: reverse colonisation, the afterlives of the dead, the sexual awakening of women. But for all its lurid scenes of horror and violence, the novel presents these matters as peculiarly informatic affairs. Dracula’s plans, along with Stoker’s novel itself, exploit the possibilities of neutral language, the rapid circulation of knowledge, and the ability of a mysterious entity to retain its distinctiveness and meaning even while assuming a variety of material forms. The Count’s English library suggests that the explosion of print media in Britain also meant an explosion of knowledge about Britain, so that a vampire could become something like his own British Survey Department. Like a Transylvanian version of Kipling’s Kim, Dracula works to perfect his English in order to avoid being identified as ‘a stranger’ in England (23) (see also Arata 1990: 639). In India, Kim can easily pass as a Muslim or Hindu boy, as a member of an assortment of castes or classes. But Dracula can transform himself not merely into non-human animals but even into a cloud of dust or mist. Like information itself, the vampire might seem able to circulate free from the limits of ordinary materiality, from spatial confinement or physical decay. Fortunately for England, Dracula’s resources ultimately prove limited and his abilities overblown. He may collect English publications, but none of the newspapers and magazines in Castle Dracula are ‘of very recent date’ – a subtle reassurance of the Count’s backwardness, or perhaps simply a token of the shortcomings of international parcel delivery to Transylvania (22). The vampire’s out-of-date periodicals befit his preference for legacy media. In a novel full of new information technologies, Dracula’s own dealings with information never ‘advance beyond hand-written letters’ (Winthrop-Young 1994: 115). Similarly, as he defies death or transforms his body, Dracula may seem to transcend matter, but he actually turns out to be materially bound – most significantly, by the boxes of Transylvanian soil that he must ship to England, and around which he must triangulate his daily movements. Dracula has hardly freed himself from the limitations of geography and matter; rather, he has simply figured out a way to move geography and matter around. The vampire hunters, on the contrary, create their own protocol for managing information, a system organised around Mina Harker and her signature technology. The protagonists’ counterattack begins when Mina sits down at her typewriter and starts processing the novel’s other media to create modern information, that reproducible, decontexualised stuff that is supposed to result from the transcendence of space and time, of matter and medium. The intimate shorthand journal her husband kept while trapped in Castle Dracula (a text Jonathan himself initially refused to re-read), Dr Seward’s phonographic account of his heartbreak and Lucy Westenra’s

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suffering and apparent death, colourful newspaper stories and brisk business letters: Mina and her typewriter process media, mass and intimate, personal and impersonal. Again and again, the vampire hunters seek ‘information’ by name; the term typically refers to some bit of commercial or legal fact that will help them follow Dracula’s movements or machinations. But in a larger sense, the group devotes itself to amassing and organising documents and data. Processed by Mina and her machine, these bits of knowledge fuse the generic characteristics attributed to information with the contours of the medium at hand. Thanks to the typewriter, texts originally set down in a wide variety of media can be copied (Mina types them onto ‘manifold’, a duplicating paper), distributed, scanned, read, collated by date, and ostensibly collected to make up the novel in our hands (Stoker 2011: 208). To defeat the vampire, Dracula’s protagonists organise not only their information but also themselves, taking on the form of the modern office, even down to its coordination around a female secretary well trained in practices such as typing and shorthand. In comparison to such collective information processing, the organisational structure of vampiredom appears hopeless. Dracula never seems to have any contact with the undead Lucy, and during the events of the novel his interaction with the female vampires of Castle Dracula is limited to a squabble over Jonathan Harker. Dependent himself on boxes of Transylvanian matter as his containers, Dracula seems to view knowledge as encased in its original material; he furiously burns the vampire hunters’ original documents and wax-cylinder recordings, presumably unaware that their information survives in typescript. In this light, the sinister psychic connection he establishes with Mina looks like a last, belated effort to build a miniature occult information network that recalls telephony or wireless. But in a final informatic reversal, information turns out to flow both ways. The Count who studied the English through the information they published about themselves now finds himself tracked down via his own unwitting transmissions.

Conclusion Courtesy of high technology, of a bustling print culture that seemed to value the accumulation and rapid circulation of knowledge over assessment and reflection on it, of transmissions across empires and perhaps from realms even further afield, information had become an expansive and ubiquitous part of daily life at the fin de siècle. It had also become a critical part of the ways in which Britons represented themselves and their world. Aaron Worth suggests that by the time of the early twentieth century’s aesthetic disruptions and cultural upheavals, ‘information itself’ could come to be seen as ‘the privileged binding agent for a modern world in which older code-systems lie in ruins’ (Worth 2014: 99). That is, the great meaning of information would lie not in any particular type of content or mode of transmission but in information’s apparent omnipresence and the protocols it required. In its very fragmentation and fecundity, then, information – as the flow of scattered bits of knowledge partly freed from time, space, matter and context – might represent the nearest thing to a unifying modern phenomenon. Reversing a familiar cliché into a playfully profound ‘maxim’, Oscar Wilde recognised the capacity of modern information to be put to unexpected use: ‘It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information’ (Wilde 1989: 570).

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Notes 1. See, e.g., ‘How the Telegraph Is Worked in the Field’, Sphere: An Illustrated Newspaper for the Home, 31 March 1900: 314. 2. On information’s debt to nineteenth-century understandings of electricity, see Menke (2008: 75–7). 3. See ‘Libraries’ (1853–60), in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th edn, vol. 13, Edinburgh: Black, p. 375.

Works Cited Arata, S. D. (1990), ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies, 33: 621–45. Bourne, R. (1990), Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth Dynasty, London: Unwin Hyman. Brake, L. (1988), ‘The Old Journalism and the New: Forms of Cultural Production in London in the 1880s’, in J. H. Wiener (ed.), Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s-1914, New York: Greenwood, pp. 1–24. Chalaby, J. K. (1998), The Invention of Journalism, Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s. Choudhury, D. K. L. (2010), Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Corelli, M. ([1888] 2004), A Romance of Two Worlds, n.p.: Prime Classics. Doyle, A. C. (1910), ‘A Reminiscence of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’, Strand, 40: 783–97. Doyle, A. C. (1891), ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Adventure IV. – The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, Strand, 2: 401–16. Fischer, C. S. (1994), America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Gissing, G. ([1891] 1993), New Grub Street, ed. J. Goode, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffith, M. (1896), ‘An Electric Eye: The Marvellous Discovery of an Eastern Professor which Distances the Röntgen Rays as They Distance Photography’, Pearson’s Magazine, 2: 749–56. Hampton, M. (2004), Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Innis, H. A. (1950), Empire and Communications, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kern, S. (1983), The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1920, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kipling, R. ([1901] 2011), Kim, ed. P. M. Krebs and T. Lootens, Boston: Longman. Kipling, R. (1899), ‘The Finest Story in the World’, in R. Kipling, Many Inventions, New York: Appleton, pp. 106–50. Lodge, O. (1889), Modern Views of Electricity, London and New York: Macmillan. Luckhurst, R. (2002), The Invention of Telepathy: 1870–1901, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Menke, R. (2013), ‘“Who is Mr. Reuter?” Objectivity and Electric Textuality in the Age of Telegraph Journalism’, English Language Notes, 51: 63–73. Menke, R. (2008), Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mitchell, B. R. (1988), British Historical Statistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nunberg, G. (1996), ‘Farewell to the Information Age’, in G. Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 103–38. Richards, T. (1993), The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London: Verso.

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Sconce, J. (2000), Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham: Duke University Press. Shannon, C. E. (1948), ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Bell System Technical Journal, 27: 379–43. Stephens, M. (1988), A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite, New York: Viking. Stoker, B. ([1897] 2011), Dracula, ed. R. Luckhurst, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, J. L. (1999), Politicians, the Press, and Propaganda: Lord Northcliffe and the Great War, 1914–1919, Kent: Kent State University Press. Wallace, A. R. (1898), The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures, London: Swan Sonnenschein. Weiner, J. H. (2011), The Americanization of the British Press, 1830s-1914: Speed in the Age of Transatlantic Journalism, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilde, O. ([1894] 1989), ‘A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated’, in Oscar Wilde, ed. I. Murray, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 571–2. Winthrop-Young, G. (1994) ‘Undead Networks: Information Processing and Media Boundary Conflicts in Dracula’, in D. Bruce and A. Purdy (eds), Literature and Science, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 107–29. Worth, A. (2014), Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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9 Fin-de-Siècle Scotland Caroline McCracken-Flesher

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ntil recently, the terms ‘Scotland’ and ‘fin de siècle’ seldom appeared together.1 At most, Scots were credited with book-ending English fin-de-siècle issues and anxieties. Critics focused on the 1890s recognised antecedents for the period’s pessimism in The City of Dreadful Night, published by James Thomson (‘B.V.’) in 1874, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).2 Even now, some find its limit point in John Davidson’s Testament of a Vivisector (1901), with its exhortation to ‘place all ideas in the crucible’, its depiction of animal experiment, and its claim that ‘Matter in itself is pain’ (Davidson 1901: note and 26).3 George Douglas Brown’s bitter critique The House with the Green Shutters (1901), in its attack on Scottish ‘kailyard’ or hometown sentimentalism, appears belatedly to expose Scotland’s failure to meet modernity with fin-de-siècle expression.4 The 1890s, it seems, happened somewhere else. If, however, we shift the question from whether Scottish writers meet fin-de-siècle expectations as developed elsewhere, and consider instead who was writing during that period, the literary landscape takes on new contours. Although Stevenson and Davidson easily fall into determinations of the ‘English’ fin de siècle given their subjects, locations and communities, a different pattern emerges when they stand aligned with contemporary Scots.5 Writers considered significant at the time include Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Buchanan, Mona Caird, J. M. Barrie, James Young Geddes, the Findlater sisters, William Sharp (‘Fiona MacLeod’), J. G. Frazer and Patrick Geddes. Many of them took up English residence for a time; most pursued broad cultural subjects; quite a few accreted power in British publishing. For these very reasons, Scottish writing establishes the fin de siècle not as a delimited or national phenomenon, but rather as a problem posed to place and, most significantly, to time. Scots certainly shared the sensibility that Elaine Showalter considers produced by the accidents of calendar time. Showalter writes: The crises of the fin de siècle . . . are more intensely experienced, more emotionally fraught, more weighted with symbolic and historical meaning, because we invest them with the metaphors of death and rebirth that we project onto the final decades and years of a century. (Showalter 1992: 2) Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken rightly challenge that ‘the fin de siècle was only an epoch of beginnings and endings if we look for them’ (Ledger and McCracken 1995: 4). Yet it is fair to observe that Scottish writers themselves bring the turning of time to the fore. My argument focuses for reasons of space on the 1890s, but by 1885 James Young

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Geddes was already despairing of the future. Those in the shadow of ‘The Spectre Clock of Alyth’ are ‘for ever and aye behind the times’ (Geddes 1886: 12–15, verse 10). Until the worn clock is set going once more, no one will ‘Yawn, start, and off their stupor shake, / To look around and astonished cry – “’Tis the end of the nineteenth century”’ (verse 15). Meantime, desire and frustration accumulate in fin-de-siècle form: Ah me! But the wheels have never whirred, And the life in the village lies yet unstirred. Alas and alack! He cometh not – The Conqueror we long have sought; The magic spell is yet unbroken; It reigns supreme – the Spectre Clock. (verse 16) The mechanics of timing produce and subvert the future, keeping the citizens of Alyth poised on the cusp of tomorrow. This was a place Scots knew well. From the 1603 union of crowns, the 1707 Union of parliaments and the 1745 rebellion, we might conclude they had an enhanced ‘sense of an ending’, to use Frank Kermode’s term (Kermode 1967). Did they have less sense of a beginning? For John Davidson, the poet aiming for a new century is stymied by his Scottish origins. His 1895 ‘Ballad in Blank Verse of the Making of a Poet’ marks time with variations to the lines: ‘For this was in the North, where Time stands still, / And Change hold holiday, where Old and New / Welter upon the border of the world’ (Davidson 1895: 7–35). After twenty-seven pages, however, the poem verges on the future. The frustrated Scot enjoys an advanced sensibility for change: ‘I am a man set by . . . / to be a thoroughfare / For all the pageantry of Time’ (34). He concludes: Within my heart I’ll gather all the universe, and sing As sweetly as the spheres; and I shall be The first of men to understand himself. . . And lo! to give me courage comes the dawn. (35) Not the only Scottish poet to resound to Walt Whitman’s influence, Davidson transforms what Cairns Craig has called the Scottish phenomenon of being ‘out of history’ into a capacious consciousness for the traffic of the times (Craig 1996). It was a traffic that came from all directions. With Craig, we might trace such Scottish self-positioning to a science – but not to the linear Darwin.6 Late-century Scots reverberated to a less determinative imagination. Nicholas Shrimpton acknowledges the British impact, alongside Darwin, of ‘Physicists working in the field of thermodynamics’: William Thomson [Lord Kelvin]’s article ‘On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy’ appeared in 1853. James Clerk Maxwell published his Theory of Heat in 1870. Balfour Stewart’s popularising textbook on The Conservation of Energy appeared in 1873. (Shrimpton 2007: 54) Shrimpton is sure of the negative effect: ‘It was not easy to be positivist about entropy.’ But for those living in the belatedly and rapidly industrialising north, these Scots and

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Ulster Scots issued a complex challenge in time. If tomorrow was not inevitable, how could one get beyond it? Cairns Craig has argued that in response, much Scottish writing bends toward the ‘unseen universe’ (Craig 2010), and Scots refuse ‘to commit themselves to the declining energy of “matter” ’ (Craig 2009: 24). Where energy is displaced but not lost, it can be recaptured through fantasy – a mode enacted by ‘Maxwell’s Demon’ and embraced by Peter Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart (authors of The Unseen Universe) in the attempt to explain this invisible science.7 We might go further: the Scottish fin de siècle stands distinct neither for yielding to entropy, nor for finding its energy elsewhere. In the light of its sciences, I suggest, Scotland shows that despite its history of endings, there are always already beginnings. The clash of unevenly developed places, perspectives and times makes Scotland’s fin de siècle the unstable, energised ‘now’. It is not surprising, then, to find Scottish writers implicated in, yet askew from, the questions of the day. ‘Finis Scotiae’, declared Patrick Geddes, as he noted the passing of Robert Louis Stevenson (Geddes 1895: 133). ‘Yet in what generation has not this been said?’ He immediately refined: ‘What land, alas, has had oftener cause to say it?’ Geddes’s query, however, opens towards ongoing experience: ‘in some young soul . . . the spirit of the hero and the poet may awaken, and press him onward into a life which can face defeat in turn’ (139). Although time, ruptured between past and future, stands central in the determinations of the fin de siècle, for some Scottish writers it runs on and gears up even as it slows down and runs out. J. M. Barrie’s Tommy Sandys travels from his mother’s exile in ‘modern’ London to her one-time home in out-of-date Thrums, but remains disconnected from both. In Sentimental Tommy (1896) he lives out a boyhood not unfamiliar to his predecessor, Tom Sawyer, but misses his chance for a future elsewhere by stepping sideways into imagination and forgetting exam time (Barrie 1896). Failure to progress by official time pushes Tommy into a rural present – herding – that figures his reality as a redirection from the future. In Tommy and Grizel (1900), our hero makes his way back into the sophisticated London world and a successful career only to have the past catch him by the throat and hang him (Barrie 1900). Meantime the girl that the novel’s structure presents for his love lives aside from, and ultimately beyond, his intermittent attentions. A social outsider herself, she is left to go forward in backward Thrums as a woman made modern by her unwanted single status. If the ‘lad of parts’ beloved of Scottish kailyard narrative simultaneously can and cannot, should and should not embrace the future, the future happens anyway, though imperfectly, in other people and unexpected places. Robert Louis Stevenson, who occasioned the lament ‘Finis Scotiae’, similarly implies the multiplicity, fluidity and potentiality of the moment. Stevenson’s late works do give a strong ‘sense of an ending’: The Ebb-Tide (1894), co-written with Stevenson’s stepson Lloyd Osbourne,8 pursues the ‘down-going men’ of Jekyll and Hyde all the way to the South Seas (Stevenson 1886: 2). Himself displaced to distant Samoa, Stevenson writes of three white men ‘on the beach’ (Stevenson and Osbourne 1894: 3): neither the educated son of a (failed) businessman, nor the ship’s captain, nor the London clerk figure the imperial control or modern potential their roles might suggest. Herrick, for all his Oxford education, has been ‘everywhere discharged’; ‘Doubtless there were fortunes to be made’, but ‘he had proved himself incapable of rising’ (6, 8). Suicide beckons, but Herrick cannot commit; opportunity knocks, but is not what it seems. Worse, before they know that, the three themselves have turned it to dross.

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Yet if opportunity turns repeatedly to disaster, disaster yields to opportunity until in the story’s last movement, dark consequences continue to shift and slide through possibility and doubt. It is worth remembering that although Stevenson died in 1894, he presumably did not plan it that way. And his words betokened dubious beginnings as much as problematic ends both in and far beyond Scotland or even Britain. Still, if pessimism is a marker for fin-de-siècle thinking, as Shrimpton argues, Scots could be as depressed as their neighbours. From Goodale and Shrimpton’s lists of nineteenth-century pessimists, we might infer that Scots lent the tone to English times – anticipating or channelling Schopenhauer, depending on the moment. Thomas Carlyle, James Thomson (‘B. V.’) and Stevenson prefigure, then Davidson communicates and through suicide enacts and stands for, period angst. What Stevenson called ‘the unrest and movement of our century’ echoes painfully through Davidson’s 1894 Ballads and Songs (Stevenson 1895: 550). In Davidson’s best-known piece, the clerk on ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ manifests indomitable will: A little sleeping seed, I woke – I did, indeed – A million years before the blooming sun. . . . I woke because I thought the time had come; Beyond my will there was no other cause; . . . I was the love that chose my mother out; I joined two lives and from the union burst . . . (Davidson 1895: 96) Will, however, begets only more striving. The poem begins with the clerk’s disconnection from the modern world: ‘I couldn’t touch a stop and turn a screw, / And set the blooming world a-work for me’; it ends with the impossibility of change: ‘It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf; / . . . But the thing is daily done by many and many a one; / And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck’ (91, 97). Such ‘systematic pessimism’, in Shrimpton’s terms, figures, too, in Robert Buchanan – another Scot relocated to London and often indistinguishable or simply not distinguished from its interests (Shrimpton 2007: 45, 48). In his ‘The New Rome’ (1898), ‘Poet’ and Aeon/Devil join in satiric critique of: another Rome, like Rome of old, Heir of the ages, gathering hour by hour The aftermath of human pride and power, Pitiless as its prototype of yore . . . As Rome was then, when all the gods were dead, When Faith was gone, and even Hope had fled, Yet when the Roman still in every land Knelt and upraised to Heaven a blood-red hand, So is our England now! (Buchanan 1898: 23) Buchanan’s England centres an empire suffering under the god it has evolved. In ‘Carmen Deific’, imperial power instantiates a juggernaut that From battle-field to battle-field . . . wends in royal array, Dead worlds are strewn like wither’d leaves on his triumphal way, The new Suns blossom at his touch, the old spent Suns grow grey; Their Lord goes marching on! (35)

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Under the imperatives of ‘progress’, civilisations rise and fall; on scales from local to cosmic, the future bears no fruit of change. Except, Buchanan suggests, by ‘God Evolving’. If we turn from the figure he elsewhere calls ‘Christus Jingo’, ‘Turn from that mirage of a God on high . . . / Fed with the blood and tears of living things’, we can produce through ‘every gentle deed by mortals done . . . / . . . God emerging, and evolved at last’ (42, 79–80). So if Scots may be pessimists, they may not be solely thus. To Terry Eagleton, the fin de siècle itself was remarkable for its multifacetedness: ‘We are speaking’, he says, of the period of Aubrey Beardsley and the Second International; of aestheticism and anarchism; of decadence and the Dock Strike. . . . intellectuals blend belief systems with staggering nonchalance, blithely confident of some invisible omega point at which Baudelaire and Kropotkin consort harmoniously together and Emerson lies down with Engels. (Eagleton 1995: 12) Holbrook Jackson, who both established and critiqued the notion of a British fin de siècle, noted the multifacetedness even of that primary attribute, decadence. The period was as certainly a period of decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The decadence was to be seen in a perverse and finicking glorification of the fine arts and mere artistic virtuosity on the one hand, and a militant commercial movement on the other. The one produced The Yellow Book . . . ; the other produced the ‘Yellow Press,’ the boom in ‘Kaffirs,’ the Jameson Raid, the Boer War. . . . The two tendencies worked together. (Jackson 1922: 22–3) How does Scottish multifacetedness compare? The Scots, too, were decadent enough. Or at least they were culturally imbricated enough to signal decadence as part of their literary project. The Pagan Review not only declared itself ‘new’ for a ‘new paganism’ in a ‘new epoch’ of ‘new comradeship’ and ‘new-rejoicing humanity’, giving a ‘new presentment of things’, it flourished on its cover the motto, ‘Sic Transit Gloria Grundi ‘ (Sharp 1892: 1–4). Setting aside the religion and ideals of the past, it asserted that ‘sexual union [should] become the flower of human life’; ‘It is Life that we preach . . . Life to the full’ (2, 4). The magazine then leads with a drama that could claim kin with Oscar Wilde’s symbolist Salome, written the previous year. A story echoing to the Scottish J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) begins with lush and portentous description: ‘The blood-red sunset turns the dark fringes of the forest into a wave of flame’; splendid priests and naked sacrifices incant before a colossal female statue: ‘We are thy children, O mighty Mother! / We are the slain of thy spoil, O Slayer!’; the sacrifice complete, the young chief appeals to a goddess at once pagan and Christian; fulfilling the Black Madonna’s decree that she is met ‘At the Gate of Death’, the drama concludes after the liaison of man and god with a tableau: the Mother/Christ burns in her sepulchre, the chief hangs crucified, ‘two long streamlets of blood drip, drip, down the white glaring face of the rock, from the pierced feet’ (5, 6, 8, 18). This decadence mashes worldwide religious traditions. But the artistic prodigality of decadence appears most not in the Pagan Review’s symbols and stories, but rather in its authorship. If, for Eagleton, fin-de-siècle multiplicity weirdly manifests the presumption that all can coalesce, William Sharp, as editor, fragments himself into seven pseudonymous beings. Splitting into distinct writing

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personalities, he transforms the monograph into a magazine to express ‘Life . . . in all its manifestations, in its heights and depths . . . For here, at any rate we are alive’ (4). Multifacetedness is both accident and strategy. It is this constructed encounter with difference, this deliberate and ongoing fracturing and multiplication, that energises Scottish writing in reaction to, and in spite of, the fin de siècle. Arthur Conan Doyle provides a test case. Doyle was also a Scot, and productive during the 1890s. His romances surely support Nicholas Daly’s argument for a genreappreciative understanding of modernism and its late Victorian roots, as do those of Robert Louis Stevenson (Daly 1999: 8). Daly builds from Fredric Jameson the argument that ‘modernism [provided] stylistic compensations for the loss of the ability to map the historical totality, while mass culture operates in an essentially narrative register, harmonizing perceived contradictions’ (9). For Daly, the romance revival stands in the gap before the division of modernism and mass culture. Specifically, its coherent narratives meet the challenge of the modern with ‘the team of professional men’ (14). Daly argues: ‘the romance revival provided the narratives and the figures that enabled late Victorian middle-class culture to successfully accommodate certain historical changes, notably modernizing processes’ (24). Undeniably, Doyle’s Holmes and Watson rearrange a challenging world into logical structures. But as story gave way to story, the 1890s’ anxious readers might legitimately have wondered whether these narratives really aimed to evacuate threat. Throughout the Scottish fin de siècle, professionals pop up – it was the age of exams, after all, well fitted to a northern population that had long privileged education. We might, however, debate these figures’ effectiveness. As Cairns Craig observes, leaving behind the nineteenth century, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes runs straight into the supernatural expressed through science in the form of the hound of the Baskervilles (Craig 2009: 21). A genre that trends towards resolution and control is founded on unknowable pasts that haunt the future; coherence is foregrounded case by case as a momentary illusion predicated on surprise. This is the story of the Scottish fin de siècle – not so much that it echoes every move of the wider discourse, but that its writers individually as well as collectively represent the moment as diverse and not dissociated from uneven contexts that extend across space and time. Of course, as Holbrook Jackson observed from the vantage of 1922, although people felt they were living amid changes and struggles, intellectual, social and spiritual . . . the interpreters of the hour – the publicists, journalists and popular purveyors of ideas of all kinds – did not fail to make a sort of traffic in the spirit of the times. Anything strange or uncanny, anything which savoured of freak and perversity, was swiftly labeled fin de siècle, and given a certain topical prominence. (Jackson 1922: 20) There was a coherence to difference. Undeniably, the market ran strong, coalescing widely varied arguments and aesthetics into one supposed sensibility. And Scots participated in this traffic. Andrew Nash argues convincingly not that Scottish ‘kailyard’ writers stood apart from the fin de siècle during which they wrote, but that they became both popular and anathema because of the energetic and professionalised publishing industry that hyped their work (Nash 2004). Yet Scots were equally prone to critique culture and commerce. With an almost thematic impetus

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they exposed the constructedness and the inconsistency of the culture industry’s ‘fin-de-siècle’ presumptions. Authors successfully meeting the market nonetheless felt its strains. Barrie challenged the moment’s focus on aesthetics in ‘Brought Back from Elysium’ (Barrie 1890). The American newspaperman Henry Morton Stanley – who in 1871 had ‘found’ the supposedly ‘lost’ Scot, David Livingstone, in Africa – rounds up the ghosts of Scott, Fielding, Smollett, Dickens and Thackeray for a conversation at ‘The Library of a Piccadilly club for high thinking’. The assembled Realist, Romancist, Elsmerian and Stylist, together with a gatecrashing American, each emphasise their fin-de-siècle uniqueness. Each, however, is a cog – or wishes to be a cog – in the contemporary culture industry that they are sure sets them apart from the past. Today ‘the work of [fiction] consists . . . in classifying ourselves and . . . classifying you’, they tell the greats (39). Unduly professionalised, these individualists turn out to be all alike in one thing: they are missing the author’s first reason for being. Resisting the unpredictability that makes up a good story, perversely, they have nothing to communicate. Thackeray hints: ‘if you thought and wrote less about your styles and methods and the aim of fiction, and, in short, forgot yourselves now and again in your stories, you might get on better with your work. Think it over’ (43). Stevenson would have agreed. He ran all the way to the South Seas to escape the pressures of a London cohort sure, in Edmund Gosse’s words, that it was ‘very nice to live in Samoa, but not healthy to write there. Within a three-mile radius of Charing Cross is the literary atmosphere’ (Gosse 1932: 223). From Samoa, Stevenson held out for new experiences and new modes of writing – to the chagrin of fin-de-siècle luminaries back home, he turned to descriptive prose and politics. The line taken by his fiction proves informative, for it directly engages the tension between industry and authorship. Barrie’s fictive writer Tommy Sandys begins as a conscientious artist but a popular failure. An aesthetic vampire, he matches the market by sucking up the sensibilities of rural Thrums and selling them on to febrile London. And he ends up dead. ‘Tommy has not lasted’, the malevolent narrator ‘J. M. Barrie’ relishes (Barrie 1900: 498). But the narrator himself continues; we hold in our hands the book that, however ephemeral, figures his success. In Stevenson’s The Wrecker (1892), the protagonist’s art and its inadequacy involve him in newspapers, advertising and sales – he circulates slowly to the nadir of the culture industry. But his failures across the globe make him available to mimic, represent and ultimately launder the stories of others as he staggers forward through fraud and fiction. In a cultural moment too easily viewed as coherent through its commercial variety, Barrie and Stevenson point to the creative impetus of accident. What, then, do we make of Scottish writers’ engagement with class – which many authors took as the determinative accident of the times? Scots include some of the major figures to address the period’s social underside. However, the major writers express its attendant ills as a phenomenon of other places. Although Stevenson’s ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ might remember the author’s student associations with Edinburgh’s underclass, the author typically dramatises the crises of capitalism among the fallen middle class and in distant places (Stevenson 1888). Mr Hyde haunts Soho, not the Edinburgh streets that were his intellectual home; it is on the beach in the Pacific that the sweepings of empire hear their stomachs growl. Similarly, in Sentimental Tommy the marital mistake that drives Tommy’s mother from Thrums means that Tommy’s formative years are passed in a dream of home and a reality of urban poverty on ‘a

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dirty London stair’ (Barrie 1896: 1). We must look to lesser writers, like James Young Geddes in his ‘A Common Affair’ with its tale of drunkenness, poverty and eviction, for a sense of small-town decay in a place that may be Scotland (Geddes 1891: 21–8). Davidson constitutes an informative example. His writing after his self-imposed exile from Scotland focuses on the south – the clerk on ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ speaks with a London accent. It is the ‘million-peopled lanes and alleys, / An ever-muttering prisoned storm, / The heart of London beating warm’ that depresses and inspires Davidson’s 1890s poems (Davidson, ‘London’, 1895: 86–7). ‘The Present is a dungeon dark / Of social problems’ but, as Fleet Street Eclogues implies by its very title, somehow these problems, artistically at least, are located outwith Scotland (Davidson 1896: 84). Davidson is, in fact, alert to the issue. Among the grub street hacks it is Scottish Menzies who challenges ‘I hear the idle workman sigh; / I hear his hungry children cry’ (77). But in this poem titled ‘St George’s Day’, imperial power overbears debate and appropriates all place. Menzies’s Scottish compatriot succumbs: ‘St George for Merry England then! / For we are all good Englishmen!’ (100). English Basil confirms the drift: ‘St George for Greater England then!’ (100). And the company ends in chorus: ‘By bogland, highland, down, and fen, / All Englishmen, all Englishmen!’ (101). The accident of empire produces and denies the social problem, but also precipitates the response and fixes it in place. Of course, in Davidson, such centralisation of a social problem may be its own rebuke. Certainly, Scots are noted as fin-de-siècle writers for a celticism that redirects attention to Britain’s peripheries. In Davidson’s Eclogues, Basil declares: ‘No Saxon, Norman, Scot, or Celt / I find, but only Englishmen’ (86). Scottish Sandy is entertained by the centralising discourse. ‘Oh, now I see Fate’s means and ends!’ he declares: The Bruce and Wallace wight I ken, Who saved old Scotland from its friends, Were mighty northern Englishmen’; the Irish Brian joins the fun: And Parnell, who so greatly fought Against a wanton useless yoke, With Fate inevitably wrought That Irish should be English folk. (90) Menzies, however, has already aborted the (joking) argument: Cockney and Celt and Scot are here, And Democrats and ‘ans’ and ‘ists’ In clubs and cliques and divers lists; But now we have no Englishmen. (86) The difference overwhelmed by empire may yet erupt within. Alongside the Celtic Revival in Ireland, Holbook Jackson decided, some Scots showed ‘a determination to be Celtic at all costs’ (Jackson 1922: 150). Gerry Carruthers tracks this impulse to Matthew Arnold’s assertion that ‘Celticism [was] a distinct component in British culture’ (Carruthers 2009: 2). By their Celticism, Irish and Scottish

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writers claimed both a proto-Saxon and an alternative authenticity. But did they sidestep or engage all the more deeply with fin-de-siècle artistic mores? It is worth remembering the role J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough played in motivating Celticism and lending it stories and structures from the beginning of the decade. But it must be acknowledged that the period’s foremost Scottish ‘Celtic’ writer, William Sharp, turned to Celticism in a London where the young W. B. Yeats was forging ahead in spiritual and national symbolism. Sharp had come by way of Glasgow and Australia to London, where by the 1890s he had a successful career as author and critic. Associated with Rossetti and Pater, a generation divided him from Yeats. Still, he was of the opinion that ‘what is new in literature is not so likely to be unfit for critics, as critics are likely to be unfit for what is new in literature’ (quoted in Sharp 1910: 110). Thus it was under the influence of a shifting aesthetic and spiritual consciousness that he became ‘Fiona MacLeod’, the renowned Celtic writer. Sharp’s construction of, and relation to, his role is telling. His 1892 magazine, The Pagan Review, showed no trend towards Celticism. Rather, an oread erupts in a landscape highland only by its heather, and in the same way Dionysus shows up in India. But as Sharp published his first, and pseudonymous, Celtic volume, Pharais (1894), he energetically pursued his Scottish roots in the direction of island and Gaelic culture. From Kilkreggan he wrote: ‘I have made friends here with a Celtic Islesman from Iona . . . and have learned some more legends and customs. . . . I have learned the rune also of the reading of the spirit’ (quoted in Sharp 1910: 236). Sharp immersed himself in experience: I was out with this man . . . in a gale, in a small two-sailed wherry. We flew before the squalls like a wild horse, and it was glorious . . . Twice ‘the black wind’ came down upon us out of the hills, and we were nearly driven under water. He kept chanting and calling a wild sea-rune, about a water-demon of the isles, till I thought I saw it leaping from wave to wave after us. . . . He has seen the Light of the Dead. (237) Such stories found their way into The Sin-Eater (1895). Corpse lights walk in the title piece; character after character falls in thrall to the sea. Sharp, in fact, had followed Yeats into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and now manifested his own visionary sensibility that also informs his writing (Blamires 2008: 98). In England he heard ‘a rushing sound in the street . . . the troubled sound of the tide . . . and there was no water’; his wife remembered knocking vainly at his study door for, Sharp ultimately replied, ‘I could not hear you for the sound of the waves’ (quoted in Sharp 1910: 242–3). Then in ‘The Ninth Wave’, the narrator learns ‘this ninth wave goes through the water on the forehead of the tide. An’ whenever it will be going it calls. An’ the call of it is – “Come away, come away, the sea waits! Follow!” ’ (Sharp 1895: 75–6). That is, although Sharp claimed to ‘resent too close association with the so-called Celtic renaissance’ (quoted in Sharp 1910: 226), he participated fully in Celticism’s mystic and aesthetic processes. After many years in London, he recrafted himself as a fin-de-siècle Celt. Not just any Celt. There is much to intrigue in Sharp’s gender-bending choice to be ‘Fiona MacLeod’ – a fiction that he maintained even as it was queried by luminaries like Grant Allen.9 ‘My name is really Fiona (i.e. Fionnaghal)’, ‘Fiona’ explains. This brings us to a challenge only debatably incorporated by contemporary Scottish writers: gender. Sharp’s wife, as biographer, credited an artistic choice for Sharp’s co-optation of the

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female voice: ‘he stilled the critical, intellectual mood of William Sharp to give play to the development of this new found expression of subtler emotions’ (Elizabeth A. Sharp 1910: 222). Yet he had been moving in this direction ‘with all the ardour of his nature’. At times, she says, the double personality ‘threatened him with a complete nervous collapse’ (223). Travelling to the islands for a rest, Sharp wrote: ‘we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood on the Greenock pier’; his wife comments, There is a curious point in his telling . . . Although the essay is written over the signature of ‘Fiona Macleod’ . . . it is obviously ‘William Sharp’ who tells the story, for the ‘we’ who stood on the pier at Greenock is himself in his dual capacity. (243) If Sharp stood at a crux in gender, however, as ‘Fiona MacLeod’ he manifests the relative lack of women’s voices in a fin-de-siècle discourse that for Scots privileged multiplicity and even made it thematic. Notably, the Sharps were London neighbours and close friends of the Scottish Mona Caird. Looking back on the 1880s, Elizabeth Sharp remembers that Caird was ‘keenly interested – as my husband and I also were – in the subject of the legal position of women’ (141–2). But if Sharp advanced the cause by eventually writing as a woman, women’s writing was not much foregrounded by Scottish fin-de-siècle publications. Their inclusivity and multiplicity stretched in other directions. Sharp’s own Pagan Review, though it declared the ‘duel between Man and Woman is to cease’, includes not one woman among the many pseudonymous authors he generated to produce that strangely faceted magazine (Sharp 1892: 2). Across the career of Barrie’s self-indulgent Tommy, Grizel remains neglected and abused until the end – when Tommy dies enacting the aesthetic of his authorship by pursuing a morally grubby aristocrat, Grizel is simply the last one standing. As for Davidson, alert to place and to poverty, his poem ‘A Ballad of Heaven’ pursues with disturbing sympathy a composer who sacrifices everything to his philosophical art: His wife and child went clothed in rags, And in a windy garret starved: He trod his measure on the flags, And high on heaven his music carved. When this hero dies, after his wife and child (and a suitable mad scene), ‘Straightway he stood at heaven’s gate, / Abashed and trembling for his sin’ (Davidson 1895: 72, 76). Nonetheless, the neglected wife and child, conveniently beatified, welcome him. Conscience is set aside, for, as he predicted, his music causes . . . like a python’s sumptuous dress The frame of things [to be] cast away, And out of Time’s obscure distress The conquering scherzo thundered Day. (78) Ironies should abound, but here and in the parallel poem, ‘A Ballad of an Artist’s Wife’, the work is worth the woman’s redemptive suffering (Davidson 1897: 8–17). All’s fair in love and art.

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Small wonder, then, that when Jane Findlater began her writing career, it was with The Green Graves of Balgowrie (1896). Here, a mother who tries to raise her daughters in a modern way ends up producing one who falls victim to an attractive soldier, and another who agrees to marry the much older and often tipsy minister who taught her. Both girls die before they can fully experience the consequences of either unfulfilling romance. Findlater’s novel, placed in the eighteenth century, doesn’t even try to locate women in modern time. By contrast, Mona Caird, as a campaigner for women’s rights, did bring her characters into the moment, but to no avail. Caird’s characters kick energetically against late-century circumstances. Mothers, having sacrificed their own lives, must believe in the worth of that sacrifice by extending it across the next generation. In The Wing of Azrael, ‘Mrs. Sedley, following the dictates of her creed, had spent her life in the performance of what she called her wifely duty’ (Caird 1889: 7–8). Her compliance has made a monster of her husband and left at a loss an intelligent daughter. As the book progresses, the daughter is coerced into marriage to save the family. She marries the older boy who harassed her so much as a child that she inadvertently threw him over a cliff and, writing at the cusp of the 1890s, Caird sees only consequences accumulating. At the end of the novel, Viola Sedley resists rape by stabbing her husband and disappears into darkness: she was indeed doomed by fate, by circumstance, by temperament; . . . she was beyond the reach of salvation. . . . She could not even repent. . . . The scene was obliterated: darkness everywhere; over the interminable uplands, in their profound solitude, in the shrouded heavens, and over the sea: pitch-black, rayless, impenetrable darkness. (3. 222, 224) Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894) shows more confidence in women’s resistance and in men’s capacity to understand in present time. This novel begins in a debate about circumstances. Hadria, who aspires to be a composer, argues vehemently against Emerson’s too easy assertion that ‘what we pray to ourselves for is always granted’ (1894: 8, 14). In terms that presage her uphill strivings against gendered traditions, parental investments and family finances, Hadria declares: ‘Who can dare to say “I am master of my fate,” when he does not know how large may be the share of the general burden that will fall to him to drag through life’? (10). In this talky and philosophical novel, Hadria, notably caught at a moment when her Celtic blood is inspired by dancing, like Viola marries a wrong man. She bears children and finds herself caught, for ‘An appeal to the maternal instinct . . . quenched the hardiest spirit of revolt’ (187). She flees the family, is brought back by her parents’ illness and need, ponders an affair, and so on. She does not escape. Indeed, the novel cuts short in what seems to be the middle of the story, stranding readers in an impossible present. Yet along the way Hadria has led a rich life in conversation with women and men, none of them paragons of women’s rights but all of them struggling for the future. Caird’s novels, then, speak at once to the broad community of the Scottish fin de siècle, the limitations to that community’s imaginations, and the fact that women had to write themselves into an aesthetic that otherwise privileged inclusiveness. While Caird’s work indicates a thematic limit point in Scottish fin-de-siècle culture, it highlights the aesthetic positioning of her fellow Scottish writers. That aesthetic challenged unitary discourse, whether of place or of period. Nowhere is this more

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evident than in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, which ran to four numbers in 1895–7. The magazine was developed by Patrick Geddes, today best known as a groundbreaking urban planner – one who integrated conservation with social and intellectual amelioration. Geddes had been the first professor of botany at the new University College in Dundee, and would become the first professor of civics and sociology at Bombay. A proponent of the ‘garden city’ idea, in the 1890s he imagined a Scottish/international community with one hub on the Edinburgh High Street in the Outlook Tower (MacDonald 2009). Geddes’s magazine, then, stood at the centre of a lively discourse that deliberately engaged place and the echoes and possibilities of time. Geddes imagined a Celtic-inflected Renascence in a fin de siècle which, looking out from Edinburgh, privileged ‘variety’. If we set aside the problem of addressing gender, too familiar in its time, The Evergreen not only theorises multiplicity, it embraces and enacts it. The ‘Proem’ to the 1895 volume, Spring, written by W. Macdonald and J. Arthur Thomson, strikes the key note: ‘This time of birth is also the time of variations, when new forms and new habits flow from the well-head of change’ (Macdonald and Thomson 1895: 9–10). Defining ‘what our particular variation may be’, it turns out that ‘though we are one, we are also many; and the words and lines which form our book will show how variously each, according to his or her listening, interprets the seasonal melody’. In the four volumes of The Evergreen, I: ‘Spring’ (1895), II: ‘Autumn’ (1895), III: ‘Summer’ (1896) and IV: ‘Winter’ (1896–7), contributions vary widely. The first number, which typifies the rest, lists fifty-four separate items. These include literature, critical/philosophical essays and art. Authors range from Sharp (as himself and ‘Fiona MacLeod’) to Geddes on the sciences, and also on the ‘Scottish Renascence’; works can be about Scotland or elsewhere; they come in English and French (by Charles Sareola); artists are individually credited, even for the illuminated letters that begin stories, and include the two women who participated in the volume, Helen Hay and Alice Gray. Celticism inflects many contributions, but items are as likely to be named for other traditions and different moments, and to refract alternative artistic fashions. Side by side with ‘The Bandruidh’ (in English) come ‘Germinal, Floreal, Prairial’ (a prose essay); ‘Natura Naturans’ (an illustration aligned with Beardsley and Hokusai); Geddes’s musings on science and philosophy; W. Walls’s realist sketch of a lion and her cubs; ‘La Littérature Nouvelle en France’; and ‘Apollo’s Schooldays’ – which depicts a naked boy in the lap of a disturbingly virile Pan.10 The ‘Proem’ does suggest one exclusion: decadence. It critiques ‘So many clever writers emulously working in a rotten vineyard, so many healthy young men eager for the distinction of decay!’ (Macdonald and Thomson 1895: 10). But decadent art is already acknowledged and admitted: ‘we do not ignore the Decadence around us. . . . It may be that [decadent artists] are a part of us.’ The issue is timing. Geddes’s Outlook Tower stood as one physical and temporal hub for an international imagination. The Evergreen, with its recentring on Scotland but its acknowledgement of minds otherwhere – and well beyond England – articulated histories and ideas across place and despite time. Capaciousness was its principle. Indeed, divisions did not close off relationships; they constructed challenge, change, energy. The ‘Proem’ decides that the decadents are a part of us; for even from the evergreen the leaves fall singly at this time of greatest hopefulness. By reaction, at least, and by counter-influence, we would

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gladly have our relation to them made certain and a remembered thing. Nay, already we seem to see, against the background of Decadence, the vaguely growing lines of a picture of New-Birth. (10–11) Throughout this volume, the world is waking up – in art, in science. But its waking depends on more than a prior sleep. As volume II insists through naturalist J. Arthur Thomson’s opening essay, ‘Life is rhythmic and is punctuated by the seasons.’ Still, the ‘curve of life is undulatory’ – not simply repeated as a cycle (Thomson 1895: 9). In The Evergreen, seasons enact recurrent change, yet the only thing we can predict is that things will change. In demonstration, The Evergreen runs out of order: Spring (I) gives way to Autumn (II), then Summer (III) is succeeded by Winter (IV). Geddes’s global sensibility places seasons against sequence. From any place, time differs and possibilities shift. Thus the degeneration expected of closed systems and a finished century yields to a generative power beyond the determinations of clock time. Energy and creativity exceed any moment by that moment’s conjunction between anywhere and anywhen. It is appropriate, then, that Evergreen volume IV concludes with the break-up of the artistic and scientific community, the decision to step apart even from the imagination of the seasons for a while. In our ends are our (non-linear) beginnings: shuffling people and perspectives against type and time someday will produce new reunions and new comradeships, new colleagueships and new collaborations: for science and history in outlook-tower and museum, for art in studio, in school, and exhibition, in building and decoration; for all in fresh gatherings and meetings, studious and joyous, Scottish or cosmopolitan, in new initiatives at home or afield.11 By recognising our stance at the shifting juncture between pasts and presents, we have moved beyond the possibility, never mind the fear, of entropy that often motivated fin-de-siècle thinking. Perched on the cusp of a century, this Scotland didn’t see itself as the ‘end’ of anything.

Notes 1. Reid (2006) is a notable exception; Shaw (2015) also addresses Scotland’s engagements with decadence. 2. Trying to understand the origins of 1885–98 as G. K. Chesterton’s ‘epoch of real pessimism’, Goodale (1932: 246) cites Thomson, Stevenson and Davidson. 3. Shrimpton’s assessment of pessimism cites this Testament as its latest example (2007: 43). 4. Carruthers (2001: 27–9) helpfully evaluates Brown’s account. 5. After he reached maturity, Stevenson divided his life between England, America and the South Seas, writing about them all, but in lively communication with London and American publishers; after working as a teacher, Davidson moved to London to pursue his literary career. 6. Eagleton (1995: 14) specifies that the mind post-Darwin ‘was a clumsy, extraneous mechanism thrown up by senseless material process; . . . consciousness is now itself a form of alienation, and an art which posits the overcoming of this, a performative contradiction’. 7. ‘Maxwell’s Demon’ explains the exchange of heat by imagining an active agent who allows the transference of energy to an alternate space. The Unseen Universe was published in 1875.

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8. See Stevenson and Osbourne (1894); Osbourne characterised the collaboration as follows: ‘I went along swimmingly . . . until I reached the end of the present book. . . . Then the commendation ceased’ (Osbourne 1924: 98). Stevenson’s letters from May to August 1893 show his own intense work, and assertion that Lloyd ‘has nothing to do with the last half’; letter to Sidney Colvin, 23 August 1893, Booth and Mehew (1995: VIII. 155–6). 9. Grant Allen subsequently wrote The Type-Writer Girl (1897) as ‘Olive Pratt Rayner’. See Sharp (1910 228–33) for Grant’s inquiries and Sharp’s pseudonymous replies. 10. For a discussion of the magazine’s art see Kooistra (2015). 11. See The Evergreen IV, Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes (1897: 156).

Works Cited Barrie, J. M. (1900), Tommy and Grizel, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Barrie, J. M. (1896), Sentimental Tommy, London: Cassell, 1896. Barrie, J. M. (1890), ‘Brought Back from Elysium’, Littells Living Age, 186: 38–43. Blamires, S. (2008), The Little Book of the Great Enchantment, Cheltenham: Skylight Press. Booth, B. and E. Mehew (eds) (1995), Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 8 vols, New Haven: Yale University Press. Buchanan, R. (1898), The New Rome: Poems and Ballads of Our Empire, London: Walter Scott. Caird, M. (1894), The Daughters of Danaus, 3rd edn, London: Bliss, Sands and Foster. Caird, M. (1889), The Wing of Azrael, 3 vols, London: Trübner. Carruthers, G. (2009), Scottish Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Carruthers, G. (2001), The Invention of Scottish Literature During the Long Eighteenth Century, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. Craig, C. (2012), ‘Scotland’s Fantastic Physics: Energy Transformation in MacDonald, Stevenson, Barrie, and Spark’, in C. McCracken-Flesher (ed.), Scotland as Science Fiction, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, pp. 15–28. Craig, C. (2009), ‘Arcades: The Turning of the Nineteenth Century’, in I. Brown and A. Riach (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 15–24. Craig, C. (1996), Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture, Edinburgh: Polygon. Daly, N. (1999), Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidson, J. (1901), The Testament of a Vivisector, London: Grant Richards. Davidson, J. (1897), New Ballads, London: John Lane. Davidson, J. (1896), A Second Series of Fleet Street Eclogues, London: John Lane. Davidson, J. (1895), Ballads and Songs, 4th edn, London: John Lane. Eagleton, T. (1995), ‘The Flight to the Real’, in S. Ledger and S. McCracken (eds), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–21. Findlater, J. H. (1896), The Green Graves of Balgowrie, New York: Dodd, Mead. Geddes, J. Y. (1891), In the Valhalla, Dundee: John Leng. Geddes, J. Y. (1886), ‘The Spectre Clock of Alyth’, in J. Y. Geddes, The Spectre Clock of Alyth and Other Selections, Alyth: Thomas M‘Murray, pp. 12–15. Geddes, P. (1895), ‘The Scots Renascence’, in P. Geddes et al., The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, vol. I, Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes, pp. 131–9. Geddes, P. (1897), The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, vol. IV, Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes. Goodale, R. (1932), ‘Schopenhauer and Pessimism in Nineteenth Century English Literature’, PMLA 47. 1: 241–61.

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Gosse, E. (1932), The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse, ed. E. Charteris, New York: Harper. Jackson, H. (1922), The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, London: Grant Richards. Kermode, F. (1967), The Sense of an Ending, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kooistra, L. (2015), ‘The Politics of Ornament: Remediation and/in The Evergreen’, English Studies in Canada, 41. 1: 105–28. Ledger, S. and S. McCracken (eds) (1995), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacDonald, M. (2009), ‘Sir Patrick Geddes and the Scottish Generalist Tradition’, Sir Patrick Geddes Commemorative Lecture of the Royal Town Planning Institute of Scotland and the Saltire Society, 20 May, http://www.rtpi.org.uk/media/579470/transcript_-_murdo_ macdonald_-_2009.pdf. Macdonald, W. and J. A. Thomson (1895), ‘Proem’, in P. Geddes et al., The Evergreen, A Northern Seasonal, vol. I, Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes, pp. 9–15. Nash, A. (2004), ‘William Robertson Nicoll, the Kailyard Novel and the Question of Popular Culture’, Scottish Studies Review, 5. 1: 57–73. Osbourne, L. (1924), An Intimate Portrait of R L S, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Reid, J. (2006), Robert Louis Stevenson, Science and the Fin de Siècle, London: Palgrave. Sharp, E. A. (1910), William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod): A Memoir, New York: Duffield. Sharp, W. (as Fiona MacLeod) (1895), The Sin-Eater and Other Tales, Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes. Sharp, W. (1892), ‘Foreword’, Pagan Review, 1, 15 August: 1–4. Shaw, M. (2015), The Fin-De-Siècle Scots Renascence: The Roles of Decadence in the Development of Scottish Cultural Nationalism, c. 1880–1914, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. Showalter, E. (1992), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London: Virago. Shrimpton, N. (2007), ‘“Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist”: Pessimism and the English “Fin de Siècle” ’, Yearbook of English Studies, 37. 1: 41–57. Stevenson, R. L. (1895), The Wrecker, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Stevenson, R. L. (1888), ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, Scribner’s Magazine, 3. 1: 122–8. Stevenson, R. L. (1886), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, New York: Charles Scribners. Stevenson, R. L. and L. Osbourne (1894), The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and a Quartette, London: Heinemann. Thomson, J. A. (1895), ‘The Biology of Autumn’, in P. Geddes et al., The Evergreen vol. II, Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes, pp. 9–17.

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10 The Irish Fin de Siècle Anne Markey

T

he fin de siècle occurred at an historical moment when it was not possible always, or clearly, to distinguish between what was British and what was Irish. Threatened by the spectre of degeneration, the Victorian fin de siècle was accompanied by a growing sense of cultural fragmentation, loss and uncertainty. Concerns about race, empire and a new social order manifested themselves in such diverse movements as Aestheticism, Decadence, Fabianism and suffragettism. Ireland, since 1801 politically contained within the United Kingdom of Great Britain, had, at least since the 1860s, posed a threat to national security and stability and so was implicated in the pervasive sense of crisis and conflict. The origins of that threat go back at least as far as the land confiscations that followed the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland and which led to the collapse of the political and social structures of the Gaelic order. The introduction in the late seventeenth century of Penal Laws, which prohibited Catholics from full participation in public life, and the Williamite war (1689–91) and subsequent settlement of the country, resulted in the emergence of a Protestant Ascendancy and in the increasing Anglicisation of the country. The Act of Union of 1800 involved the dissolution of the Irish parliament and the imposition of English law on Irish society. By the early nineteenth century, fluency in English had become a prerequisite of social and economic advancement while Irish was perceived as being the ‘language of the poor and ignorant’ (Connolly 1995–6: 94). The Great Famine of 1845–52, which resulted in over one million deaths from disease or starvation and the emigration of over one and a quarter million people, led to a further reduction in the number of monoglot Irish speakers and so to the marginalisation of the Irish language and its associated traditions. Following the Famine, there were long campaigns for better rights for tenant farmers and ultimately for land redistribution, as well as increasingly vociferous demands for legislative independence. The closing decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of often contradictory and contested expressions of political nationalism in Ireland. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), founded in Dublin in 1858, went underground after staging an unsuccessful insurrection in 1867; the Irish National Land League, founded in Mayo in 1879, launched a series of agrarian agitations, which became known as the Land War, to force a redistribution of land from landlords to tenants; and the Home Rule League, founded in 1873, was renamed the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1882. In the early 1880s, the IRB conducted a bombing campaign not only in London but in other major British cities, including Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. At the same time that the IRB, now more popularly known as the Fenians,1 were demanding a fully independent Irish republic, Irish MPs in Westminster, led first

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by Isaac Butt and later by Charles Stewart Parnell, were agitating for the establishment of a more limited form of legislative independence. When a Home Rule bill introduced by William Gladstone was defeated in 1886, Liberals hostile to Gladstone’s support for Home Rule seceded from the party to become Liberal Unionists, and Gladstone’s government collapsed. Parnell’s citation in 1890 as co-respondent in the divorce case between the Irish MP Captain William O’Shea and his wife, Katherine, proved more damaging, as it led to divisions within the Home Rule movement and to his own political downfall. The resultant scandal led Gladstone to threaten the withdrawal of the support of the Liberal Party for Home Rule for Ireland should Parnell continue to lead the Irish nationalist party. Parnell refused to stand down, producing a bitter split in the Irish Parliamentary Party. On 6 December 1890, following five days of acrimonious debate in committee room fifteen at Westminster, forty-four members, under Justin McCarthy, walked out, leaving Parnell with only twenty-seven supporters. In 1893, a second Home Rule bill, again introduced by Gladstone, passed the House of Commons but was defeated in the House of Lords.2 The political, cultural, linguistic and even moral dimensions of the Irish situation were, then, an inescapable part of the fabric of the Victorian fin de siècle. In turn, the Irish fin de siècle reflects both the more general cultural fragmentation of the period and the particular challenges posed by Ireland’s distinctive national experience. Acknowledging the Irish dimension of the Victorian fin de siècle is a necessary step towards appreciating the complexity of the Irish fin de siècle. Ireland’s history of military conquest followed by settlement and increasing Anglicisation was reflected in the decision of several major writers to live and publish in Victorian England. The significant contribution made by male Irish writers to fin-de-siècle literature has long been acknowledged. As early as 1913, Holbrook Jackson stressed the crucial importance of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw to the culture of late nineteenth-century England, devoting a chapter to each in his study of The Eighteen Nineties, without mentioning that both were born and grew up in Ireland (Jackson 1913: 72–90, 234–48). Jackson argued that although Wilde freely borrowed from ‘Whistler, Pater, Balzac, Gautier and Baudelaire’, he ‘added unto them something that their originals did not possess’, and praised Shaw for bringing novelty to ‘the stable mental atmosphere of English and, indeed, Teutonic culture’ (104, 234). More recent critics have argued that it was the Irish backgrounds of these and other writers that set them apart from their metropolitan contemporaries and enabled them to make distinctive contributions to Victorian fin-de-siècle literature and culture. So, for example, Declan Kiberd claims that Wilde and Shaw ‘occupied and used England as a laboratory in which to solve many of their own domestic problems at a useful remove’ (Kiberd 1995: 24). Elsewhere, Kiberd argues that The Importance of Being Earnest is ‘(amongst other things, of course) a parable of Anglo-Irish relations and a pointer to their resolution’ (Kiberd 1998: 17), while Jarlath Killeen reads ‘The Selfish Giant’ through the prism of the Land War, arguing that ‘Wilde’s refusal to have the Giant-landlord killed demonstrates that his politics had much in common with the social conservatism of other Irish Protestant nationalists’ who ‘wished to preserve the landlord class as a benevolent ruling order for the future (Killeen 2007: 72). Such claims have been disputed by other critics who variously argue that efforts to Hibernicise Wilde’s work exaggerate the importance of his Irish background, misrepresent his politics and overestimate his familiarity with Irish folk traditions

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(Small 2000: 67; Ní Fhlathúin 1999; Haslam 2014; Markey 2014). These critical disagreements have opened up new ways of approaching Wilde’s work that highlight the complexity of the Irish fin de siècle. The same is true of recent critical work on other canonical Irish writers of the period. For instance, Terry Eagleton reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an allegory of Irish politics, describing the eponymous anti-hero as an absentee landlord who buys up property in England: Like many an Ascendancy aristocrat he is a devout Anglophile, given to poring over maps of the metropolis; and this gory-toothed vampire plans, a touch bathetically, to settle in Purfleet, as a number of the Anglo-Irish gentry were to migrate from the wilds of Connaught to the watering holes of the English south east. (Eagleton 1995: 215) Jarlath Killeen, by contrast, sees Count Dracula as representative of Catholic Ireland’s demands for legislative or complete independence, claiming: Bram Stoker’s work can be read as part of a response to the spectre of republican terrorism that was usually configured in the British press as atavistic and monstrous – finding brilliant realisation in the feudal Catholic Count Dracula effecting a reverse invasion of England. (Killeen 2014: 204) Bruce Stewart suggests that ‘Dracula represents both the landlord and the forces behind agrarian crime in the Land War era’ (Stewart 1999: 243). That critics disagree on exactly how Stoker’s Irish background is reflected or negotiated in Dracula highlights the unexpected, albeit contradictory, interpretative possibilities offered by approaching what has become a classic fin-de-siècle novel from an Irish perspective. Recent criticism has also drawn attention to the Irish backgrounds of such diverse female fin-de-siècle writers as Sarah Grand (Frances Bellenden Clarke McFall), L. T. Meade (Elizabeth Thomasina Toulmin Smith), George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) and Katherine Cecil Thurston (see Standlee 2010; Meaney 2011). As is well known, the term ‘New Woman’ was coined by the Irish-born novelist Sarah Grand in an 1894 essay entitled ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’. In an extensive study of the connections between feminist and anti-imperialist discourse and political activism at the fin de siècle, Tina O’Toole argues that the revolutionary Irish context informed the creation of the literary figure of the New Woman, which challenged fixed constructions of gender, race and class. The sometimes ambiguous response of Irish authors of New Woman fiction to these issues is related to the anxieties and concerns of women belonging to the increasingly beleaguered Ascendancy caste. In an important caveat, O’Toole points out that ‘Irish New Woman fiction is multivalent in that it emerged from, and may be read within the context of, a cluster of translocational political interventions in the 1880s’ (O’Toole 2013: 11). The significant contribution made by Irish writers to the Victorian fin de siècle is only one aspect of the Irish fin de siècle, the importance of which resides less in what it brings to the Victorian scene generally than in being differently constituted (an observation which is also applicable, as Caroline McCracken-Flesher shows in the chapter preceding this, to fin-de-siècle Scotland). The Irish fin de siècle had its own particular concerns which sometimes overlapped with those of Britain but did not

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necessarily do so. The prevalence of poverty in rural Ireland as a result of an agricultural slump that led to the foundation of the Land League sparked a number of novels that responded in various ways to the spectre of destitution and the very real threat of agrarian violence. James H. Murphy and Heidi Hansson note that although ‘land and the relationship between landlords and tenants had long been important issues in Irish fiction’, these issues were central to dozens of Land War novels that ‘were produced very rapidly and with an almost journalistic sense of immediacy’ in the final years of the nineteenth century (Hansson and Murphy 2014: 7). That approximately seventy such novels appeared between 1879 and 1913, published most often in London but also in Dublin and Belfast, suggests that Land War novels can be regarded as a significant literary response to the economic, social and political challenges besetting Irish society during the fin de siècle. At first, these works were critical of profligate landlords and sympathetic to the plight of impoverished tenants and agricultural labourers. For example, in Dowdenham: A Tale of High Life in the Present Period (1879), which is set largely in aristocratic English society circles, W. R. Ancketill records how a visit to his Irish estates convinces George Fitzwalter, a young absentee landlord, of the evils of the existing system of land tenure and management. Eilis Carr’s An Eviction in Ireland, and its Sequel (1881) sympathetically recounts the trials of a family facing eviction and ends with a new landlord promising to reverse the injustices of his predecessor. Very soon, however, opposition to the Land League and support for Ascendancy control began to emerge in what James Murphy has dubbed ‘the novel of Anglo-Irish resistance’ (Murphy 2011: 168). Letitia McClintock’s A Boycotted Household (1881) expresses open hostility to the Land League through its approving account of the resistance of the Hamilton family to a no-rent campaign being conducted against them as part of the Land War. Rosa Mulholland’s Marcella Grace, first serialised in the Irish Monthly before being published in London in 1886, inserts contemporary gender politics into its nuanced examination of agrarian unrest; the eponymous Catholic heroine, who inherits an estate after the death of her mother, who had married beneath her, is determined to be a just landlord but finds that this is only achievable with the assistance of the local parish priest and her lover, later husband, Brian Kilmartin. Although critical of the landlord class, Mulholland’s solution, to quote Derek Hand, is simply ‘to replace a Protestant aristocracy with a Catholic one’ (Hand 2014: 47). In A Drama in Muslin: A Realistic Novel (G. Moore 1886), first serialised in the Court and Society Review and published in London in 1886, George Moore similarly combines gender and agrarian politics in an account set against the backdrop of the Land War of the adventures of a group of girls educated in a convent school on the hunt for husbands. By the 1890s, the number of Land War novels being published began to dwindle, but some that appeared continued the earlier tendency to incorporate aspects of ‘the Woman Question’ into their fictionalised accounts of contemporary or recent Irish life. Eileen Fleming, the heroine of Priests and People: A No-Rent Romance (I. M. O. 1891), is the nationalist daughter of a Catholic landlord, educated in France, who returns to Kerry when her father and uncle are murdered. Her original intention to care for her tenants is thwarted by the hostility and persecution she encounters from them. Consequently, her early conviction that she has the power to effect change is shown to be nothing more than the deluded belief of a naive young girl. Female aspirations are similarly undermined in James J. Moran’s Two Little Girls in Green: A Story of the Land League (1898), in which an independent young woman who behaves recklessly

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at a time in the recent past ‘when the New Woman was not yet heard of’ (Moran 1898: 15) ends up marrying a landlord and embracing her role as her English husband’s helpmate. Land War novels draw attention to the nuanced class and religious politics that underpinned agitation for agrarian reform in late nineteenth-century Ireland. Although their main concern is with land tenure in Ireland, they also tellingly reveal a broader fin-de-siècle anxiety about gender politics, particularly about the education and empowerment of women and their role in a changing society (an issue also discussed by Jad Adams in his contribution to this volume). While the Land War was the primary focus of much Irish political fiction of the period, fin-de-siècle novelists also turned their attention to the vexed issue of Home Rule, both before and after the fall of Parnell in 1891. One of the earliest novels dealing with the subject is The Battle of the Moy, or, How Ireland Gained her Independence, published in America in 1883 (Anon. 1883), in which Ireland, following the introduction of Home Rule, becomes economically prosperous after declaring itself a republic during a war between Britain and Germany in the 1890s. The enthusiastic support for Irish independence expressed in The Battle of the Moy is not echoed in a number of later works identified by Edward James that address ‘the worries that were raised in Ireland by the first Home Rule Bill of 1886’ (James 1986: 5). These include The Great Irish Rebellion of 1886 (Anon. 1886b), which vehemently opposes Home Rule and expresses a profound distrust of Gladstone; Newry Bridge, or Ireland in 1887 (Anon. 1886a), which predicts a civil war in Ireland if the Home Rule bill is passed; and The Siege of Bodike: A Prophecy of Ireland’s Future (Lester 1886), in which Edward Lester provides a bitingly satiric account of the suppression of an imaginary Fenian attempt to establish a full Irish republic after Home Rule is introduced. Two 1888 pamphlets, In the Year One (A.D. 1888) of Home Rule de Jure (Anon. 1888b) and Opening and Proceedings of the Irish Parliament: Two Visions (G. H. Moore 1886), offer similarly alarming warnings of the dangers of Home Rule. Such dire predictions, at least from a unionist point of view, are echoed in longer works of fiction. The Great Irish ‘Wake’: by One Who Was There (Anon. 1888a), set in Dublin in 1850, recounts how Home Rule, granted by Queen Victoria, leads to demands for complete independence, culminating in a rebellion which is quelled by brave Ulster loyalists. Ireland’s Dream: A Romance of the Future (Lyon 1888), and 1895, Under Home Rule: A Tale (Anon. 1893) similarly employ a futuristic setting to predict that Home Rule will lead to political instability, civic unrest and increased demands for full independence. In Ireland a Nation: The Diary of an Irish Cabinet Minister (Moore 1893), Frank F. Moore, assuming the persona of the Right Honourable Phineas O’Flanagan, forecasts the increasing power of the Catholic church in an imagined independent Ireland of the future. The Irish Rebellion of 1898: A Chapter in Future History (Donovan 1893) is, as the title reveals, another futuristic fiction that prophesies that Home Rule will lead to the establishment of an Irish republic with disastrous consequences for both Ireland and England. One work not mentioned by James, however, indicates that Home Rule novels were not invariably opposed to the concept of legislative independence for Ireland. The hero of A Son of Erin (Swan 1899), written by the Scottish writer Annie Shepherd Swan, is an Englishman who becomes committed to the cause of Home Rule on discovering his true Irish identity. Nevertheless, the majority of fin-de-siècle novels that deal with Home Rule warn of the dangers of ceding to what were seen as nationalist demands for self-governance in

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Ireland, and so reflect and promote a pro-unionist outlook and agenda. Within their pages, the spectre of Home Rule is confronted and vanquished, but it is notable that many are set in the future, suggesting that the sense of crisis engendered by debates on the issue was not amenable to immediate resolution. Victorian turn-of-the-century anxieties about issues as varied as the organisation of an ideal society, evolution, degeneration and the rise of science led to a surge of futuristic fictions, such as William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898). In common with these works of science fiction, Home Rule fiction combined realism with speculative fantasy. Not only did both genres look to a vividly imagined future as a way of confronting and negotiating contemporary concerns, but they also provided dystopic visions of what was to come. Although focused on national politics, Home Rule and Land War novels were variously published in England, Scotland and the United States, as well as in different parts of the island of Ireland. The theatre scene in Ireland during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century similarly bears witness to the importance of both international and national contexts. From 1874 to 1890, the Theatre Royal and the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin regularly hosted English touring companies who staged productions of plays by William Shakespeare, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, as well as more recent ones by Dion Boucicault, T. W. Robertson, Arthur Wing Pinero and Oscar Wilde. Indeed, in 1885, Wilde lectured on ‘Beauty, Taste and Ugliness in Dress’ and ‘Art in Modern Life’ in the Gaiety, where, three years earlier, the celebrated American actor Edwin Booth had presented, to great acclaim, ‘his entire repertoire, with the exception of Iago’ (Bloom 2013: 266). Dublin audiences were equally appreciative of touring Wild West shows and minstrel shows. While the Gaiety and the Theatre Royal offered Irish audiences the chance to enjoy Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Tristan and Isolde, the Star of Erin Music Hall and the Grafton Theatre in Dublin, like the Alhambra Music Hall in Belfast, offered less high-brow musical fare comprising popular songs, speciality acts, comic turns and performing animals. In 1877, Cork’s Opera House opened its doors to the public, offering varied programmes that included lectures by distinguished speakers such as Charles Stewart Parnell and performances by Sarah Bernhardt and the Carl Rosa Company, which also staged Michael William Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl in Dublin and Belfast.3 The career of Hubert O’Grady, who played the lead role in an 1877 run of Boucicault’s The Shaughraun (1874) in the Gaiety in Dublin, reveals that an increasing demand and taste for drama dealing with Irish themes were becoming apparent by the mid-1880s. Margaret Kelleher elaborates: As manager of the ‘Irish National Company’, O’Grady and his wife toured Ireland, England and Scotland, where performances included O’Grady’s own plays, most famously his melodramas with Irish subjects: Eviction (1879), Emigration (1880), The Famine (1886) and The Fenian (1888). (Kelleher 2006: 488) O’Grady’s success was facilitated by the appointment in 1884 of J. W. Whitbread as manager of the Queen’s Royal Theatre in Dublin. Whitbread was committed to the idea of producing Irish plays in Dublin, where they were practically guaranteed a favourable reception, before touring them further afield. The author of some fifteen Irish political

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melodramas, including The Nationalist (1891), Lord Edward, Or ’98 (1894) and Theobald Wolfe Tone (1898), Whitbread, according to Christopher Morash, ‘brought into being something that did not exist at any of the other major Irish theatres of the time: an audience with a collective identity that carried over from play to play’ (Morash 2002: 110). Yet, as Mary Trotter observes, ‘Irish nationalist melodrama at the Queen’s ran concurrently with other national performance practices’ (Trotter 2001: 40). The Queen’s Royal Theatre was a commercial undertaking, and the plays staged by Whitbread, which drew on Ireland’s recent history, aimed to please large audiences. In September 1897, W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory and Edward Martyn decided to set up a different kind of national theatre – the Irish Literary Theatre: We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us. (Gregory 1913: 8–9) An enthusiasm for the type of experimental drama pioneered by Le Théâtre Libre, founded in Paris by André Antoine in 1887, is implicit in this condemnation of popular, commercial theatre. While Antoine objected to the frivolity and vulgarity of the well-made play, Yeats, Gregory and Martyn objected to the buffoonery of melodrama. Supporters of Le Théâtre Libre ‘included people associated with diverse aesthetic sensibilities: the naturalists Zola and Edmond de Goncourt, the symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé, renowned actors from the Comédie Française, and well-known critics from the major newspapers’ (Charnow 2000: 71); the Irish Literary Theatre similarly expected to obtain ‘the support of all Irish people’. Overlooking the existence of an Irish theatre audience which was used to seeing Irish plays being performed regularly in Dublin, the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre hoped to create an audience receptive to their own ideas about how Ireland should be represented on stage. The conflation of Celtic and Irish and the reference to an ‘imaginative audience’ reveal the extent to which Matthew Arnold’s ideas about innate racial character informed the manifesto of the Irish Literary Theatre, and enabled its founders to sidestep the ambivalence of their own cultural heritage. As Joep Leerssen has pointed out, however, the concept of the Celt is ‘a mixum gatherum’, with little if any ‘historical validity’ (Leerssen 1996: 1). George Watson similarly argues: The key to the intellectual strategy of Celticism is the annulment, elision or denial of history. The marked preference in this discourse for ‘Celtic’ over Gaelic, for example, may indicate an urge . . . to sidestep the divisive politics, both social and linguistic, of Scotland and Ireland since the eighteenth century. (Watson 1996: 208)

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The invocation of Celticism in the Irish Literary Theatre’s manifesto implicitly suggests a comparable desire to avoid divisive politics – a suggestion that is supported by the explicit statement that its work ‘is outside all the political questions that divide us’. The desire to reveal ‘the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland’ to an uncorrupted audience suggests a concomitant wish to return to, and revive, a pristine, prelapsarian, precolonial past. Critical of the ‘easy sentiment’ of political melodrama, playwrights associated with the Irish Literary Theatre did not draw on recent history, as O’Grady and Whitbread did. Instead, in such plays as Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen (1899), Alice Milligan’s The Last Feast of the Fianna (1899), Edward Martyn’s Maeve (1899) and Yeats and George Moore’s Diarmiad and Grannia (1901), they turned to Irish folklore and mythology in an attempt to revive the ‘ancient idealism’ of Ireland in the hearts and minds of contemporary theatregoers. The Irish fin de siècle was less concerned with degeneration and the past than with regeneration and the future. The concept of the fin de siècle invokes a Janus-like sense of an old order ending and the arrival of a new one, and so involves an anxiety both about the past and about the future. Revivalism looks both to the past and to the future, in an attempt to harness or invent tradition to produce new cultural forms. Revivalism, defined by Gregory Castle as an ‘attitude toward the past, which takes the form typically of tactical revisions of historical narratives and the redeployment of rhetorical tropes and images in the service of redefining the Irish future’, flourished in fin-de-siècle Ireland, resulting in the formation of various associations and institutions dedicated to the creation of distinctively Irish forms of identity (Castle 2011: 292). In 2000, Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst warned: ‘The current focus on the fin de siècle has risked becoming too fascinated with the gothic science of degeneration, forgetting a host of other voices that contested visions of collapse with dreams of regeneration’ (Ledger and Luckhurst 2000: xxiii); Caroline McCracken-Flesher identifies a similar theme in Scottish fin-de-siècle thinking, noting at the conclusion to her contribution to this volume that ‘Scotland didn’t see itself as the “end” of anything.’ Ledger and Luckhurst offer several examples of various regenerative voices, ranging from socialists through anarchists and feminists to eugenicists. The voices of Irish revivalists, whose backgrounds were as diverse as their aims, should be added to those examples. Revivalism, Kevin Collins has argued, fed into ‘the development of an ideology which became synonymous with Irish nationalism’ (Collins 2002: 11). Yet revivalism was not a monolithic or even a coherent movement, and the differing ideologies reflected in and promulgated by various revivalist movements gave rise to conflicting versions of what constituted the putative Irish nation. The Gaelic revival, associated with figures including David Comyn, Douglas Hyde and Patrick Pearse, and with such organisations as the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language (founded 1876) and the Gaelic League (founded 1893), aimed to revitalise Irish as a spoken language and to foster the development of a modern Irish-language literature. From this perspective, language was a crucial component of national identity, and reviving the Irish language was a necessary precursor to constructing an authentic and distinctive national identity. In 1892, Douglas Hyde declared: I have no hesitation at all in saying that every Irish-feeling Irishman, who hates the reproach of West-Britonism, should set himself to encourage the efforts, which

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are being made to keep alive our once great national tongue. The losing of it is our greatest blow, and the sorest stroke that the rapid Anglicisation of Ireland has inflicted upon us. (Hyde 2000: 187) For Patrick Pearse, ‘Literature which is in Irish is Irish literature; literature which is not in Irish is not Irish literature’ (Pearse 1907). That view was echoed by Eoin Mac Néill, one of the co-founders of the Gaelic League, who insisted: ‘In Ireland there is no possible foundation for a national culture except the national language’ (cited in Corkery 1942: 25). Participants in the Irish literary revival, associated with such movements as the National Literary Society (founded 1892), the Irish Literary Theatre (founded 1899) and the Abbey Theatre (1904), and with writers including Yeats, Gregory and John Millington Synge, disagreed. These revivalists adapted and drew on tradition, mainly folklore and mythology, to create a modern Irish literature in English. Yeats, in particular, was influenced by Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan, restating their views in ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ (1898) and describing himself as the voice of a great renaissance based on ‘the revolt of the soul against the intellect’ (Kelly and Domville: 1986: 303). Irish-language activists were not impressed. In 1898, an anonymous commentator castigated ‘that strange sect who maintain that Irish may be written in English, and who, while ignorant of any “Celtic” language, write and talk much of a “Celtic” Movement’ (O’Leary 1994: 282). A few year later, D. P. Moran, the champion of Irish Ireland, described the concept of the Celt as ‘one of the most glaring frauds that the credulous Irish people have ever swallowed’, while Fr. Richard Henebry objected to what he described as ‘a false Keltic note born out of ignorance and the “English” poetry produced in Dublin’ (Moran 1905: 22; Henebry 1909: 587). Linking the Irish Literary Theatre to objections made in 1899 by Professors Atkinson and Mahaffy of Trinity College Dublin to the ratification of Irish as a subject on the secondary-school curriculum, Patrick Pearse condemned the aims of Yeats and his associates: The Irish Literary Theatre is, in my opinion, more dangerous, more glaringly antinational, than Trinity College. If we once admit the Irish literature in English idea, then the language movement is a mistake. Mr. Yeats’ precious ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre may, if it develops, give the Gaelic League more trouble than the Atkinson-Mahaffy combination. Let us strangle it at its birth. Against Mr. Yeats personally we have nothing to object. He is a mere English poet of the third or fourth rank, and as such he is harmless. But when he attempts to run an ‘Irish Literary Theatre’ it is time for him to be crushed. (Pearse 2000: 189) The relationship between these two strands of revivalism was clearly often oppositional. Yet, at the same time, Hyde’s involvement with Yeats in the foundation of the National Literary Society in 1892 and the Abbey’s staging of Hyde’s Irish-language play, Casadh an tSúgáin (‘The Twisting of the Rope’), alongside Yeats and Moore’s Diarmuid and Grania in 1901, demonstrates that the relationship between these apparently opposing movements was also, at least on occasion, complementary. Indeed, in 1905, Patrick Pearse told Lady Gregory: ‘in An Claidheamh Soluis [the Gaelic Leagues’s weekly bilingual newspaper] I have been trying to promote a closer comradeship between the Gaelic League and the Irish National Theatre and Anglo-Irish writers generally. After all, we are

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allies’ (Ó Buachalla 1980: 94). Yeats’s later admission that his own early work was ‘not the poetry of insight and knowledge but of longing and complaint – the cry of the heart against necessity’, and his desire to write someday the ‘poetry of insight and knowledge’, echo, at least partly, Gaelic revivalists’ disavowal of otherworldly Celticism (Kelly and Domville 1986: 54–5). To complicate matters further, even within each movement, as it aimed to create a modern Irish literature in one or other language, there were shifts in perspective and disagreements on crucial issues including how Ireland should be represented, the legitimacy of adapting tradition to reflect modern conditions, the type of linguistic register to be used, and the extent to which writers should look elsewhere for cultural models. As Philip O’Leary has demonstrated, Gaelic revivalists were split on the related issues of the desirability of writing in vernacular Irish and of using folk narratives as models for contemporary fiction. Nativists insisted that modern authors should replicate the classical standards associated with the seventeenth-century historian Geoffrey Keating (Seathrún Céitinn), and maintained that folklore should provide narrative templates for a revival of Gaelic literature. Progressivists, meanwhile, believed that writers should use colloquial Irish and draw on contemporary international literary models (O’Leary 2006: 233–6). In the end, writers used both traditional and modern literary forms, and supporters of caint na ndaoine (‘speech of the people’) won the day. That, however, led to other antagonisms, as tensions arose between speakers of different dialects as well as between native speakers and members of the Gaelic League whose first language was English (237). In common with Gaelic revivalists, English-language dramatists and commentators were divided on the usefulness of folklore as the basis for modern literature. Declan Kiberd and P. J. Mathews observe: ‘If writers like W. B. Yeats and Alice Milligan favoured a drama founded on a rediscovery of Irish myth and legend, the critic John Eglinton worried that such an approach would not express the realities of ordinary people’ (Kiberd and Mathews 2015: 156). Edward Martyn and George Moore were more attracted by Ibsenite realism than by the ethereality of folklore and mythology. In 1906 Martyn and a group of actors seceded from the Abbey Theatre to establish the Theatre of Ireland Company. Regional rivalries also surfaced in the theatre movement. Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill, founders of the Ulster Branch of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1902, changed the company’s name to the Ulster Literary Theatre in 1904, after the Dublin organisation demanded royalties for a production of Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan. According to Eugene McNulty, ‘the new name represented a more confident desire to express a distinctively “Ulster” identity’ (McNulty 2008: 72). Indeed, Hobson is reported to have said: ‘Damn Yeats. We’ll write our own plays’ (Bell 1972: 1). In 1908, Daniel Corkery and Terence McSwiney founded the Cork Dramatic Society ‘to do for Cork what similar societies have done for Dublin and Belfast’ (cited in Maume 1993: 21). Despite significant schisms between, and even within, these revival movements, a sense of possibility and hope of regeneration characterised the Irish cultural arena in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The revivalist impulse was not confined to the literary arena, but was also manifest in the visual arts and music. Established in 1894, the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland, which followed the ideals of John Ruskin and William Morris, ‘deliberately emphasised local and national characteristics in the design and skills it emulated’ (Bowe 2012: 59). Similarly, ‘the Dun Emer and Cuala enterprises represented an interesting conflation of the ideals and aesthetics of the English Arts and Crafts movement with

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those of the Irish Cultural Revival’ (Browne 2011: 31). The Feis Ceoil Association, founded in 1896, initially aimed to showcase and promote traditional Irish music and song, but under pressure from members of the Royal Irish Academy of Music soon included a composer’s competition in its festivals to encourage original composition (Dibble 2013: 18). Revivalism was a complex, multifaceted phenomenon which, in all its manifestations, was concerned with the value of Irish tradition in the modern, evolving world. The case of sport reveals that Irish revivalism was not only an expression of cultural nationalism but also a phenomenon rooted in fin-de-siècle discourse. On 1 November 1884, in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, Michael Cusack and Maurice Davin founded the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), which aimed to counteract the popularity of English sports such as cricket and rugby by promoting the development of traditional Gaelic games throughout the country. Cusack declared: ‘We tell the Irish people to take the management of their games into their own hands, to encourage and promote in every way every form of athletics which is peculiarly Irish’ (Cusack 1884). Recognising the cultural impact of sport, the GAA sought to develop a distinctive form of national identity through the promotion of such games as hurling and Gaelic football. In fact, the origins of these sports are so uncertain that, as Alan Bairner points out: ‘It would probably be fair to say that the games that were most actively promoted by the GAA represented an invention of tradition at least as much as a revival of indigenous practices’ (Bairner 2005: 195). By revitalising, or indeed inventing, Gaelic games, the GAA aligned itself closely with the nationalist agenda. Significantly, the Association also encouraged the development of physical fitness and athleticism, traits that were perceived as achievable antidotes to fin-de-siècle fears of degeneration and decay. Max Nordau argued that mental degeneracy and physical inactivity were linked: ‘With this characteristic dejectedness of the degenerate, there is combined, as a rule, a disinclination to action of any kind, obtaining possibly to an abhorrence of activity and powerlessness to will’ (Nordau 1895: 20). Nordau went further, linking the fitness of the individual body to the future health of the race: When under any kind of noxious influences an organism becomes debilitated, its successors will not resemble the healthy, normal type of the species, with capacities for development, but will form a new sub-species, which like all others, possesses the capacity of transmitting to its offspring, in a continuously increasing degree, its peculiarities, these being morbid deviations from the normal form – gaps in development, malformations and infirmities. (16) Addressing the first meeting of the GAA, Archbishop T. W. Croke claimed that ‘our national sports . . . are held in dishonour, and dying out . . . They are all things of the past, too vulgar to be spoken of, except in ridicule, by the degenerate dandies of the day’ (cited in Ó Conchubhair 2009: 59).The GAA was, at least in part, an optimistic Irish response to fin-de-siècle fears about individual and racial degeneration. Irish revivalism has traditionally been linked to the political developments in Ireland and England, particularly to the downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell, following the O’Shea divorce case of 1890. In 1901, Yeats declared: ‘The fall of Parnell and the wreck of his party and of the organisations that supported it were the symbols, if not

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the causes, of a sudden change’ (1899: 856). Expanding on the nature of that sudden change, he identified 1891, when Parnell died, as the year in which ‘national life was finding a new utterance’ and linked that new form of cultural expression to the emergence of revivalist organisations including the Irish Literary Society in London, the National Literary Society in Dublin, which has just founded the Irish Literary Theatre, and the Feis Ceoil Committee in Dublin, at whose annual series of concerts of Irish music, singers and pipers from all parts of Ireland compete; and the Gaelic League, which has worked for the revival of the Gaelic language with such success that it has sold fifty thousand of its Gaelic text books in a year. (857) In a lecture delivered to the Royal Academy of Sweden in 1923, Yeats went further in linking the Irish cultural and literary revival and the fall of Parnell, presenting both as connected causes of the 1916 Rising and the subsequent War of Independence: The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish war, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned from parliamentary politics; an event was conceived; and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event’s long gestation. (Yeats 1955: 559). Although Yeats’s claim that revivalism began in 1891 may seem persuasive, it is undermined by the evidence of his own first full-length publication: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, which was first published in London in 1888. This edited anthology had been commissioned in February of that year by Ernest Rhys, the general editor of Walter Scott’s Camelot Classic series, which aimed to make significant works of prose available to general readers. In Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry Yeats presents edited versions of stories previously published by earlier collectors of, and commentators on, Irish folklore, including Thomas Crofton Croker, William Carleton, Patrick Kennedy, Samuel Lover and Lady Jane Wilde. These collectors published versions of traditional oral narratives that they usually claimed actually to have heard themselves. Yeats, by contrast, dealt only with printed sources, presenting Irish folk narratives as significant prose works. In the introduction, he assessed the efforts of his predecessors: ‘The various collectors of Irish folk-lore have, from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of view of others, one great fault. They have made their work literature rather than science’ (Yeats 1995: 6). Singling out Lady Wilde’s two-volume collection Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1888) for particular praise, he declared: We have here the innermost heart of the Celt in the moments he has grown to love through long years of persecution, when, cushioning himself about with dreams, and hearing fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on the soul and the dead. (7) Like Lady Wilde, Yeats preferred legends to international folktales, and spent long hours chasing down what he described as ‘stories of the Croker type’ (Kelly and

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Domville 1986: 78). He reported that the research for the anthology involved three months labour in the British Museum, for which he received about £12. He added, though, that he did not think himself badly paid because he had chosen the work for his own purposes. He wanted to study the tradition of Ireland, he said, believing that such subject matter would help him to create a ‘sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only, but that I might leave it to later Irish poets’ (O’Donnell and Archibald 2002: 128). In July 1888, he told Katharine Tynan: ‘it has been a very laborious buisness [sic] but well worth doing, for all the material for poetry, if for nothing else. You and I will have to turn some of the stories into poems’ (Kelly and Domville 1986: 88). In other words, Yeats presented Irish folklore as a resource for contemporary Irish writers, and the collection shows what a valuable source of inspiration that material could be. In addition to the wide-ranging introduction, informative prefaces and previously published stories, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry includes some recent English-language translations of old Irish poetry and a selection of nineteenth-century original verse on folk themes by writers including William Allingham, Samuel Ferguson, Gerald Griffin and Yeats himself. These poems are interspersed with traditional narratives throughout the anthology, creating a continuum between anonymous, communal folk narratives and original, individual, literary works. On the evidence of Yeats’s anthology, and despite the later claims of its editor, the revival had begun in 1888. Nevertheless, the belief that the fall of Parnell left a political vacuum filled by the cultural activity of his fellow revivalists has proved extremely tenacious.4 In 2015, it was echoed by Declan Kiberd and P. J. Matthews in their Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891–1922: With the Irish Parliamentary Party deeply riven by the Parnell split and demoralised by the failure of Home Rule, the next two decades would be characterised by a decline in faith in constitutional politics and the emergence of a new approach to Irish problems. The idea, which rapidly gained traction, was to mobilise and apply the latent national intelligence of the country to the practical and cultural needs of Ireland. (Kiberd and Mathews 2015: 21) While the bitterness of the 1890 split in the Irish Parliamentary Party and the death of Parnell in 1891 undoubtedly traumatised Irish political life and impacted on Irish cultural life, the extent to which national politics drove the cultural revival is debatable. Indeed, Roy Foster has argued that ‘the supposed “lull” in politics should not be taken as read’, pointing out that not only the Parliamentary Party but also the United Irish League vigorously campaigned on issues as varied as local government and agrarian experimentation in the years following Parnell’s death (Foster 1989: 63). Critics opposing what Terry Eagleton has described as ‘the Yeats-sponsored view that politics yielded ground to culture after the fall of Parnell’ (Eagleton 1995: 232) have related the Irish revivalism to broader literary, cultural and economic contexts within Ireland and elsewhere. Pascale Casenove, for example, traces the trajectory of the Irish literary revival through what she describes as representative stages of assimilation, differentiation and autonomy, which conform to the ‘design of a nearly universal literary structure’ in a world republic of letters (Casenove 2005: 305). Sinead Garrigan Mattar, by contrast, analyses the work of Yeats, Synge and Gregory to show how they

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variously appropriated the concept of the ‘primitive’ through the lenses of comparative anthropology, mythology and colonial travel writing to produce a distinctively Irish form of modern literature that reflected a ‘romantically primitivist vision of Ireland’ (Mattar 2004: 20). By explicitly and convincingly linking the work of these writers with the science of comparative anthropology, Mattar implicitly and persuasively rejects the argument that political disenchantment alone drove the Irish revival. P. J. Mathews, meanwhile, giving due acknowledgement to the importance of literature, argues that the revival is best understood as a progressive movement that witnessed the cooperation of various self-help organisations designed to encourage local modes of material and cultural development. Far from being a literary movement, dominated by the ‘towering figure of Yeats’ and his associates Synge and Gregory, the revival, according to Mathews, consisted of a ‘complex network of relations’ between a range of economic, cultural and political enterprises, such as the Abbey Theatre, the Gaelic League and the Irish Agricultural Organization Society (Mathews 2004: 102, 6). What bound these apparently disparate groups together was their readiness to use traditional cultural forms as the basis for an alternative modernisation project. Most relevantly for a consideration of the Irish fin de siècle, in his groundbreaking study Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge: Darwin, an Athbeochan agus Smaointeoireacht na hEorpa (‘The Irish-Language Fin de Siècle: Darwin, the Revival and European Thought’), Brian Ó Conchubhair rejects the insular Yeatsian narrative of a flurry of cultural activity in response to political disillusionment, and convincingly situates Gaelic revivalism within contemporary European debates about race and social Darwinism. In the introduction, Ó Conchubhair sets himself the challenge of examining ‘the intellectual trends, cultural theories, and various ideologies that shaped and constructed Gaelic revivalists’ understandings of various aspects of the language: typography, spelling, grammar, idioms, dialect and the novel’ (Ó Conchubhair 2009: 1). In what follows, he draws on an impressive range of sources to deal with these issues in such detail as to leave no doubt that the leaders of the Gaelic movement were astute and well-informed European intellectuals. Arguing that vigorous, often venomous arguments about typeface, orthography and dialect were rooted in Max Müller’s theories on dialectic regeneration, and that concerns about Béarlachas (the introduction of English-language words, phrases and grammatical constructions into vernacular Irish) were informed by the mixed-race theory proposed by Arthur Gobineau, Ó Conchubhair persuasively presents the Gaelic revival as a movement grounded in fin-de-siècle concerns about linguistic evolution and racial miscegenation. In the final chapter, he analyses two 1901 novels – Cormac Ua Conaill by Patrick Dineen and Grádh agus Crádh by Úna Ní Fhaircheallaigh – focusing on how their depictions of illness and suicide were influenced by Nordau’s theory of degeneration. Throughout Europe and America, fin-de-siècle concerns about evolution and degeneration became manifest in an increased interest in children and the psychology of childhood, as evidenced in the work of pioneers including G. Stanley Hall, Henry Maudsley, James Sully and William W. Ireland (Shuttleworth 2010: 181–206). In Ireland, the symbolic, ideological possibilities of childhood were more significant than the study of child development. From an imperial perspective, as Ashis Nandy has argued, colonised races can be either childlike – ‘innocent, ignorant, but willing to learn’ – or childish – ‘ignorant but unwilling to learn, ungrateful, sinful, savage’ (Nandy 1983: 16). From the perspective of an emerging nation, by contrast, children

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embody both the past and hope for the future, and so are crucial conduits of the spirit of the nation. Eibhlín Nic Niocaill, an enthusiastic member of the Gaelic League and friend of Patrick Pearse, declared: It is the function of education to transmit to the children, who are to be the men and women of the future, the heritage of the past, and to develop in them those faculties that will enable them to take their part in the march of progress, and to hand on a richer and nobler tradition to their descendants. (Nic Niocaill n.d.: 4) The importance of children to the nationalist project in fin-de-siècle Ireland is apparent in the establishment of periodicals and organisations such as Young Ireland: An Irish Magazine of Entertainment and Instruction (1875–91), The Catholic Children’s Magazine (1878–81), the Children’s Land League (1881–2), the Irish Fireside Club (1887–1924) and Fianna Eireann (founded 1909) (Nic Conghail 2011). The period also witnessed an upsurge in the publication of children’s fiction set in Ireland and dealing with Irish themes, although it was not until the early twentieth century that nationalist writers including Ella Young and Padraig Colum began drawing on Irish folklore and myth to produce children’s books, and Irish-language authors, including Patrick Pearse, started writing stories for children. As a result, late nineteenthcentury children’s fiction generally reflects Ascendancy or English values. For example, Flora Shaw’s Castle Blair: A Story of Youthful Days (1878) concerns a group of unruly children who enjoy good relations with the local tenantry while living in their uncle’s castle. As Robert Dunbar remarks, ‘Castle Blair is, in fact, the nearest we have in children’s literature to the “big house” novel and, like its adult counterparts, is largely concerned with juxtaposing English and Irish perspectives’ (Dunbar 2004: 34). The firm of Blackie and Son, originally established in Glasgow in 1809 and later specialising in children’s books, purchased premises at 89 Talbot Street in Dublin in 1878. From then until the end of the nineteenth century, it published over a dozen titles by Irish authors, including Katharine Tynan, Clara and Rosa Mulholland, Violet G. Finny and Elizabeth Lysaght, as well as stories either set in Ireland or featuring Irish-born protagonists by G. A. Henty, one of the firm’s most successful and popular writers. While a few of these works contain little or no overt Irish content, the majority reflect the socio-political tensions that characterised Irish society at the fin de siècle, when the power of the Protestant Ascendancy was waning. As a result, inheritance is a frequent theme. Rosa Mulholland’s Banshee Castle (1895), for example, recounts the adventures of Patricia, Dympna and Finola, the young, orphaned daughters of Lord Tyrconnell, who are loved by the local peasantry, while Elizabeth Lysaght’s Jack-a-Dandy; or, The Heir of Castle-Fergus (1889) is concerned with the initial animosity and eventual reconciliation between young rivals for the inheritance of a title and an estate. Henty’s Irish romances, meanwhile, celebrate the contributions of Irish soldiers to the defence and expansion of the British Empire. In general, the Irish titles published by Blackie and Son at the fin de siècle aimed to bolster either British imperialism and/or the power of the Protestant Ascendancy at a time when the consolidation of the Catholic middle classes was leading to increased demands for some degree of legislative independence. The Irish fin de siècle reflected both the more general sense of crisis and possibility and the particular challenges and opportunities presented by Ireland’s distinctive national experience. Irish political concerns inflected the British fin de siècle, and Irish

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writers were amongst the most influential contributors to English-language literature of the period. To be Irish at the fin de siècle was to be simultaneously British. Yet the Irish fin de siècle is very distinctive in its focus, through various revival movements, on regeneration and the future. As Yeats observed, the idealism that underpinned these movements in late nineteenth-century Ireland carried forward into the idealism that launched the 1916 Rising. Although it failed in military terms, the Rising contributed to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The Irish fin de siècle, then, was the chrysalis from which modern Ireland, with all its vices and virtues, emerged.

Notes 1. The ‘Fenian Brotherhood’ was the US counterpart of the IRB, eventually giving a version of its name to all those engaged in similar violent political activity. 2. For a full discussion, see Jackson (2000: 24–105). 3. For more detail see Morash (2002). 4. See, for example, Fallis (1978) and Kelly (1976).

Works Cited Ancketill, W. R. (1879), Dowdenham: A Tale of High Life in the Present Period, Belfast: Marcus Ward. Anon. (1893), 1895, Under Home Rule: A Tale, London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent. Anon. (1888a), The Great Irish ‘Wake’: By One Who Was There, London: Clement Smith. Anon. (1888b), In the Year One (A.D. 1888) of Home Rule de Jure, London: W. H. Allen. Anon. (1886a), Newry Bridge, or Ireland in 1887, London: Wiliam Blackwood & Sons. Anon. (1886b), The Great Irish Rebellion of 1886, Retold by a Landlord, London: Harrison & Sons. Anon. (1883), The Battle of the Moy, or, How Ireland Gained her Independence, Boston: Lee and Shepard; New York: Charles T. Dillingham. Bairner, A. (2005), ‘Irish Sport’, in J. Cleary and C. Connolly (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 190–205. Bell, S. H. (1972), The Theatre in Ulster: A Survey of the Dramatic Movement in Ulster from 1902 until the Present Day, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. Bloom, A. W. (2013), Edwin Booth: A Biography and Performance History, Jefferson: McFarland. Bowe, N. G. (2012), ‘Preserving the Relics of Heroic Time’, in B. Cliff and N. Grene (eds), Synge and Edwardian Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 58–83. Browne, K. E. (2011), The Yeats Circle: Verbal and Visual Relations in Ireland, 1880–1939, Ashgate: Palgrave. Carr, E. (1881), An Eviction in Ireland, and its Sequel, Dublin: M. H. Gill. Casenove, P. (2005), The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Castle, G. (2011), ‘Irish Revivalism: Critical Trends and New Directions’, Literature Compass, 8. 5: 291–303. Charnow, S. (2000), ‘Commercial Culture and Modernist Theatre in Fin-de-Siècle Paris: André Antoine and the Théâtre Libre’, Radical History Review, 77: 60–90 Collins, K. (2002), Catholic Churchmen and the Celtic Revival in Ireland, 1848–1916, Dublin: Four Courts Press. Connolly, S. (1995–6), ‘Approaches to the History of Irish Popular Culture’, Bullán, 2. 2: 83–100. Corkery, D. (1942), What’s This About the Gaelic League?, Dublin: Gaelic League. Cusack, M. (1884), ‘A Word About Irish Athletics’, Irishman, 11 October: 8.

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Dibble, J. (2013), Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath, Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Donovan, A. (1893), The Irish Rebellion of 1898: A Chapter in Future History, Dublin: Hodges Figgis. Dunbar, R. (2004), ‘Rebuilding Castle Blair: A Reading of Flora Shaw’s 1878 Children’s Novel’, in C. Keenan and M. S. Thompson (eds), Studies in Children’s Literature 1500–2000, Dublin: Four Courts Press, pp. 31–7. Eagleton, T. (1995), Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture, London: Verso. Fallis, R. (1978), The Irish Renaissance, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan Foster, R. F. (1989), ‘Anglo-Irish Literature, Gaelic Nationalism and Irish Politics in the 1890s’, in Ireland after the Union: Proceedings of the Second Joint Meeting of the Royal Irish Academy and the British Academy, London, 1986, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 61–82. Gregory, Lady (1913), Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography, New York and London: Putnam. Hand, D. (2014), ‘George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin: Art and the Middle Classes’, in H. Hansson and J. H. Murphy (eds), Fictions of the Irish Land War, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 41–56. Hansson, H. and J. H. Murphy (eds) (2014), Fictions of the Irish Land War, Bern: Peter Lang. Haslam, R. (2014), ‘The Hermeneutic Hazards of Hibernicizing Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 57. 1: 37–58. Henebry, Fr. R. (1909), ‘Revival Irish’, Leader, 6 February: 587. Henty, G. A. (1899), Under Wellington’s Command: A Tale of the Peninsular War, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin: Blackie & Son. Henty, G. A. (1898), With Moore at Corunna, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin: Blackie & Son. Henty, G. A. (1888), Orange and Green: A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin: Blackie & Son. Hyde, D. (2000), ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, in T. Crowley (ed.), The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366–1922: A Sourcebook, London: Routledge, pp. 182–8. I. M. O. (1891), Priests and People: A No-Rent Romance, London: Eden, Remington. Jackson, A. (2000), Home Rule: An Irish History 1800–2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, H. (1913), The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, London: Grant Richards. James, E. (1986), ‘The Anglo-Irish Disagreement: Past Irish Futures’, Linen Hall Review 3. 4: 5–9. Kelleher, M. (2006), ‘Prose Writing and Drama in English, 1830–1890: From Catholic Emancipation to the Fall of Parnell’, in M. Kelleher and P. O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, vol. I, pp. 449–99. Kelly, J. S. (1976), ‘The Fall of Parnell and the Rise of Irish Literature’, Anglo-Irish Literature, 2: 1–23. Kelly, J. and E. Domville (eds) (1986), The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kiberd, D. (1998), ‘The Artist as Irishman’, in J. McCormack (ed.), Wilde the Irishman, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 9–23. Kiberd, D. (1995), Inventing Ireland, London: Jonathan Cape. Kiberd, D. and P. J. Mathews (eds) (2015), Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Irish Cultural and Political Writings 1891–1922, Dublin: Abbey Theatre Press. Killeen, J. (2014), The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction: History, Origins, Theories, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Killeen, J. (2007), The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Aldershot: Ashgate. Ledger, S. and R. Luckhurst (eds) (2000), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880–1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Leerssen, J. (1996), ‘Celticism’, in T. Brown (ed.), Celticism, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 1–20. Lester, E. (1886), The Siege of Bodike: A Prophecy of Ireland’s Future, Manchester: Heywood. Lyon, E. D. (1888), Ireland’s Dream: A Romance of the Future, London: S. Sonnenschein, Lowrey. Lysaght, E. (1889), Jack-a-Dandy; or, The Heir of Castle-Fergus, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin: Blackie & Son. Markey, A. (2014), ‘Wilde the Irishman Reconsidered: “The Muses care so little for geography!”’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 57. 4: 443–62. Mathews, P. J. (2004), Revival: the Abbey Theatre, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement, Cork: Cork University Press, in association with Field Day. Mattar, S. G. (2004), Primitivism, Science and the Irish Revival, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Maume, P. (1993), Life that is Exile: Daniel Corkery and the Search for Irish Ireland, Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast. Meaney, G. (2011), Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change: Race, Sex, and Nation, London: Routledge. McClintock, L. (1881), A Boycotted Household, London: Smith, Elder. McNulty, E. (2008), The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival, Cork: Cork University Press. Moore, F. F. (1893), Ireland a Nation: The Diary of an Irish Cabinet Minister, Belfast: Olley. Moore, G. (1886), A Drama in Muslin: A Realistic Novel, London: Vizetelly. Moore, G. H. (1886), Opening and Proceedings of the Irish Parliament: Two Visions, London: Reeves & Turner. Moran, D. P. (1905), The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, Dublin: James Duffy. Moran, J. J. (1898), Two Little Girls in Green: A Story of the Land League, Aberdeen: Moran. Morash, C. (2002), A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mulholland, R. (1895), Banshee Castle, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin: Blackie & Son. Mulholland, R. (1886), Marcella Grace: An Irish Novel, London: Kegan, Paul, Trench. Murphy, J. (2011), Irish Novelists & the Victorian Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nandy, A. (1983), The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ní Fhlathúin, M. (1999), ‘The Irish Oscar Wilde: Appropriations of the Artist’, Irish Studies Review, 7. 3: 337–46. Nic Conghail, R. (2011), ‘Young Ireland and The Nation: Nationalist Children’s Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Éire-Ireland, 46. 3: 37–62. Níc Niocaill, E. (n.d.), Nationality in Irish Education, Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son. Nordau, M. ([1892] 1895), Degeneration, London: William Heinemann. Ó Buachalla, S. (ed.) (1980), The Letters of P. H. Pearse, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. Ó Conchubhair, B. (2009), Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge: Darwin, an Athbeochan agus Smaointeoireacht na hEorpa, Indreabhán: An Clóchomhar. O’Donnell, W. H. and D. N. Archibald (eds) (2002), The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Basingstoke: Palgrave. O’Leary, P. (2006), ‘The Irish Renaissance, 1880–1940: Literature in Irish’, in M. Kelleher and P. O’Leary (eds), The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, vol. 2, pp. 226–69. O’Leary, P. (1994), The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881–1921: Ideology and Innovation, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. O’Toole, T. (2013), The Irish New Woman, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Pearse, P. (2000), ‘The Irish Literary Theatre’, in T. Crowley (ed.), The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366–1922: A Sourcebook, London: Routledge, pp. 188–9. Pearse, P. (1907), ‘Irish Literature’, An Claidheamh Solais, 13 April: 9.

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Shaw, F. (1878), Castle Blair: A Story of Youthful Days, London: Kegan Paul, Trench. Shuttleworth, S. (2010), The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Medicine and Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Small, I. (2000), Oscar Wilde: Recent Research. A Supplement to Oscar Wilde Revalued, Greensboro: ELT Press. Standlee, W. (2010), ‘George Egerton, James Joyce and the Irish Künstlerroman’, Irish Studies Review, 18. 4: 439–52. Stewart, B. (1999), ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Possessed by the Spirit of the Nation?’, Irish University Review, 29. 2: 238–55. Swan, A. S. (1899), A Son of Erin, London: Hazell, Watson & Viney. Trotter, M. (2001), Ireland’s National Theatres: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Watson, G. (1996), ‘Celticism and the Annulment of History’, in T. Brown (ed.), Celticism, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 207–20. Yeats, W. B. (1995), Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. Yeats, W. B. (1955), Autobiographies, London: Macmillan. Yeats, W. B. (1899), ‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’, North American Review, 169. 517: 855–67.

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11 Providing an Ideal Home: Paternalism and Persuasion at Bournville 1895–1914 Margaret Ponsonby

F

in-de-siècle clichés about the ‘house beautiful’ typically centre on the iconic ‘palaces of art’ associated with a late nineteenth-century and (predominantly) London-based literary and artistic elite. They included the elaborately decorated homes of artists James Tissot and Lawrence Alma Tadema in St John’s Wood, of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Mortimer Menpes, Oscar Wilde and William Bell Scott in Chelsea, and Leighton House (home of artist Frederic Leighton) in Holland Park Road. Details of the homes themselves, the copious literature that was produced about them (in publications such as Beautiful Houses, Being a Description of Certain Well-Known Artistic Houses (1882) or Travels in South Kensington (1882)), and the voyeurism they encouraged have been well documented by Gere and Hoskins (2000). This chapter, by contrast, takes as its theme a different, although exactly contemporary, idea of the ‘ideal home’, one which was developed in Birmingham rather than London, for a purpose and population quite distinct from the inhabitants of those fashionable, metropolitan, ‘aesthetic interiors’, and which encouraged a rather different kind of looking. The village of Bournville on the outskirts of Birmingham and adjacent to the Cadbury factory has been seen as the forerunner of many local authority housing schemes in the early twentieth century (Gaskell1987: 56).1 The early houses built at Bournville combined a variety of house designs in low-density and attractive roads with generous gardens and open spaces. These features all contrasted with the rows of dreary and regimented streets built under the prevailing ‘by-laws’.2 From its earliest years Bournville was praised for its innovative town planning and its employment of ideas championed by the garden city movement, and its architecture drew on Arts and Crafts solutions for designing small, affordable domestic dwellings. Indeed Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the garden city movement, suggested that Bournville had influenced the formation of his ideas (Howard 1946: 30). It has also been praised for early attempts to achieve a ‘social mix’ of middle- and working-class housing (Sartissian and Heine 1978). More recently Bournville’s significance has been reappraised. The strict control that was exerted on tenants through rules and regulations has been criticised, and its promotion of stereotypical gender roles has been explored (Berry 2013). In addition, the intentions of its founder, George Cadbury, have been critically analysed, with suggestions that Bournville was mainly used to generate good publicity for the factory (Bryson and Lowe 2002).

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Certainly the Cadbury family exercised a high level of control over their model village and its occupants that suggested a Victorian paternalism as well as a wish to create their idea of idyllic homes suited to a new century. To understand the impetus for building the village of Bournville and its subsequent evolution, it is important to acknowledge that it provides a complex mix of the prevailing social conditions, architecture, design, religious and philanthropic imperatives, and practical solutions to housing factory workers once the family business had relocated to a new and rural setting, although Bournville was never intended solely for Cadbury employees. However, rather than revisit these problematic issues this chapter has a specific and narrow focus, and that is to concentrate on the early years of Bournville, and to explore how the main protagonists of the scheme communicated their idea of an ideal home through the use of a show house. Their ideas for a model village resulted in a particular form that was a product of its time, resulting as it did from late nineteenth-century conditions and the prevailing ideals for creating homes for the future. There were two distinct aspects that came together to form Bournville in its early years; first, the architectural and design attitudes of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which idealised rural life and combined emotional responses to house design with practical solutions involving shape and form; and second, the personalities of the main protagonists in the venture: George Cadbury and his wife, Elizabeth, and their architect, William Alexander Harvey.3 These three people in their different ways were single-minded in their approach to creating Bournville: that it should provide ideal aesthetics and perfect domestic conditions for happy and healthy families.4 These themes of architecture, design and social conditioning can be demonstrated through an analysis of the use made of a show home in the early years of the village. This innovative step has been somewhat overlooked, despite the many studies made of Bournville, and is therefore worthy of closer scrutiny. Before looking at the show home which operated between 1902 and 1911 this chapter will first set the scene with a brief description of the initial housing built on the estate, and then it will introduce the three characters of George and Elizabeth Cadbury and W. A. Harvey so that their various roles in the creation of the show house can be appreciated.

The Founding of Bournville The story of the founding of Bournville is fairly well known.5 The Cadbury brothers, George and Richard, decided to move their factory out of central Birmingham and purchased land for the purpose four miles outside the city at Bournbrook in 1879. Initially eighteen houses were built for a few key workers, designed by Alfred Pickard Walker, the estate surveyor. These were substantial houses but were in no way unusual in design or street layout. However, when the young architect W. A. Harvey was employed from 1895 to draw up plans, the scheme took a clear and original turn. By 1900, 313 houses had been built, and 1,000 houses were completed by 1912.6 Bournville incorporated many ideas that were current at the turn of the century. The rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of Britain together with the proliferation of slum housing for the poor had resulted in a number of reports on housing conditions, and the solution was seen by some to lie in the ideas of the garden city movement, which combined all aspects of planning from the architecture and the street layout to the use of open spaces, access

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to countryside, and the general well-being of residents.7 Bournville combined all these in miniature, and therefore attracted many visitors, as well as articles in local, national and international publications.8 Cadbury professed that one of his main criteria for building the model village was to demonstrate that good housing could be affordable for ordinary working-class families. In this aim he was not entirely successful. Bournville was mainly inhabited by betteroff working families and middle-class tenants. Harvey was replaced in 1904 because his designs proved to be too expensive, although he remained as a consultant for many years.9 Henry Bedford Tylor took over as architect for the village. His designs were plainer than Harvey’s and were therefore more economic to build.

The Cadbury’s Idea of an Ideal Home Fundamental to the founding of the Cadbury’s chocolate firm was their Quaker religion. While many Quakers quietly left their strong beliefs behind them during the nineteenth century as their business interests became established and successful, this was not the case with the Cadbury family (Corley 1988). Thompson has suggested that George Cadbury was among the group of Quakers ‘who did not abandon their principles enjoining simplicity and abjuration of outward display’ (Thompson 2003: 97). Their religious outlook informed their ideas for Bournville in many ways; for example, no public house was allowed, and a Friends Meeting House was erected on Bournville Green in 1905 (also designed by Harvey). George Cadbury believed in the good influence that could be derived from nature (Gaskell 1987: 144). He thought that physical work in fresh air would benefit his tenants physically and mentally and therefore insisted on all the houses having gardens large enough to be productive. Any tenants who did not keep their gardens in good order were reprimanded; however, positive encouragement was also given in the form of the loan of tools and a library of gardening books, and the gardens of the earliest houses came with fruit trees already planted (Gardiner 1923: 143). Land for allotments was allocated and competitions were instigated for fruit and vegetables grown on them. Similarly, evening classes were encouraged to teach useful handicrafts and skills. The Ruskin Hall was completed in 1903 and included a library, reading room and lecture hall; it held exhibitions intended to promote understanding of art and design. A swimming baths and recreation ground complete with sports pavilions were all completed in the early years of the village. Elizabeth Cadbury cannot be left out of the story of Bournville. ‘She was a moving force in all [her husband George’s] plans, particularly as they affected the lives and interests of women and children’ (Scott 1955: 75). Elizabeth was involved both informally – discussing with her husband every aspect of the plans for Bournville – but also formally, by being a member of the Bournville Village Trust committee. In addition, she forged her own active role by visiting tenants when they first moved into a house, to welcome them and to give help and advice on their new accommodation and how they might best fit in to the community of village life. She was passionate about ensuring that children should live in conditions that would contribute to their health and well-being. The provisions for healthy hobbies might now seem somewhat overbearing, and suggests that the Cadburys were trying to control the behaviour of their workforce in their free time. Similarly, checking up on how well gardens were kept and visiting

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people to give advice all smacks of a surveillance that would be totally unacceptable today. The prevailing conditions in inner cities at the time, which many of their tenants would have experienced before moving to Bournville, do offer some mitigation for George and Elizabeth Cadbury’s desire to introduce, instruct and impose their idea of a healthy lifestyle. Most of their tenants would have experienced very different living conditions in Birmingham, which had a large number of back-to-back properties at the time, and most working-class housing would have been insanitary, crowded, damp and bug-infested, with no outdoor space for gardening and leisure. George and Elizabeth were products of the Victorian age when wealthy people, particularly those with strong religious convictions, often felt it was their duty to be philanthropic and to contribute money to charities of which they approved. What was perhaps less usual was the direct involvement that the Cadburys practised; for example, in his youth George Cadbury had taught at an Adult School for the poor in Birmingham, and he and Elizabeth welcomed gatherings of the scholars to their home at Woodbrooke Manor (Harrison 1999: 28–32). Later, Cadbury did not ‘feel easy’ about living in a large manor house and it was given to the community (Gardiner 1923: 253). With the planning and building of Bournville the Cadburys demonstrated their wish to go beyond elevating poor housing conditions and instead to build a viable alternative.10 As well as having a genuine if overzealous concern for their tenants, the Cadburys were also tireless in their involvement in the planning and execution of the housing at Bournville. All of their biographers comment on this dedication that they shared. Carol Kennedy says that ‘George Cadbury planned every detail of Bournville Village to an extraordinary degree’ (Kennedy 2000: 37). His early biographer made the same point: that in the early days of Bournville could be discerned ‘George Cadbury’s genius for detail. He was not content with model housing in the abstract. He wanted every device that would ease life for the tenants’ (Gardiner 1923: 142). Similarly, Elizabeth accompanied her husband as he walked to the factory; according to Richenda Scott, discussing with him the types of houses and cottages, and their ‘labour-saving devices’ (Scott 1955: 75). Despite this level of involvement, the real force behind the shaping of Bournville in its early years was the architect William Alexander Harvey. Aged just twenty when he was appointed architect at Bournville in 1895, Harvey recognised that the project was an opportunity to engage with the ‘housing problem’ as well to promote his ideas in architectural design and layout. In the ‘Introduction’ to his 1906 book on Bournville, Harvey began by stating the need for change: ‘the housing conditions of the past will not suffice for the future’. Like the Cadburys he wanted insanitary and cramped conditions to be swept away and replaced with houses that were well designed, with gardens and open spaces.11 In addition, Harvey had a clear idea of what kind of architectural aesthetic was called for to create homes. He wanted to produce a harmonious effect, using variety in his designs and materials, but without ‘useless’ decoration (Harvey 1906: 5). In this desire he was following Arts and Crafts precepts, and many of his designs have much in common with other practitioners of the same period, such as Charles Voysey, Ernest Gimson and Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, who all took inspiration from regional variations in cottage design while adapting them for modern living. Harvey’s additional design brief was to produce houses that would be economic to build and which then could be rented for a reasonable amount to bring in a return on the investment of about 4 per cent (Abercrombie 1910–11: 19). This combination of

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objectives was shared by Harvey’s near contemporary Raymond Unwin, who was to become an important influence on the post-First World War local authority housing. Unwin and his partner, Barry Parker, set out their philosophy in a series of lectures which demonstrate the circulation of ideas to like-minded people, whether architects, designers or philanthropic housebuilders like Cadbury.12 Their ideas were a reaction against the fussy decoration that had prevailed for much of the Victorian period, and they advocated ‘absolute simplicity, directness and straightforwardness’ (Unwin and Parker 1901: 69). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, innovative interior design took various forms that in their different ways were in striking contrast to those of the eliteinspired mainstream, which were mostly neo-rococo furnishings typified by the popular firm of Waring and Gillow. The aesthetic movement had flourished from the 1880s, and art nouveau ideas coming from the Continent were gradually making an impact. These movements depended on ‘artistic’ decoration that was meant to display individuality in taste, but were often associated with frivolity and even decadence. A 1902 publication described the ‘Aesthetic Craze’ as ‘effeminate, invertebrate, sensuous, and mawkish’ (Jennings 1902: 55). Similarly, the designer W. R. Lethaby, who was also the principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, told students in Birmingham that ‘the frantic contortions of the so-called Art Styles’ were a ‘repulsive sort of demi-monde idea’ and that art nouveau was ‘distinctly unhealthy and revolting’ (quoted in Cooper 1988: 212). Neither these newer styles, nor the traditional and historical mainstream, suited Harvey’s or his clients the Cadburys’ outlook and vision for Bournville. In contrast, the Arts and Crafts Movement often utilised a pared-down frugality, sometimes taken to ascetic extremes in its celebration of a simple way of life.13 This was in keeping with the sympathies not only of the Cadburys but of other Birmingham non-conformist families who had ‘an old-fashioned Puritan modesty’ despite their wealth (Crawford 1984: 36). In housing, this attitude was articulated through the vernacular revival using regional features. Traditional craft building methods and materials produced decorative details that sprang from the methods and materials employed. These included attractive barge boards, and contrasts between brick, timber, stone and slate. Internally these ideas continued with doors with simple latches and hinges, for example, but even more important was the way that the interiors expressed ideals of homes and homemaking; thus traditional fireplaces based on the inglenook helped to show the link between hearth and home. All of these architectural ideas and the ideals they demonstrate feature strongly in Harvey’s 1906 book on Bournville; they particularly suited George and Elizabeth Cadbury’s outlook and their wishes for housing their tenants. Thus the houses in Bournville were designed to express architecturally, both externally and internally, specific artistic ideas and homemaking ideals. But how, then, to ensure that tenants got the message that the architecture aimed to express, and that they were in turn sufficiently influenced to incorporateit into their own lives? These ambitions could be realised in two ways: by rules and regulations; and by example.

Rules and Regulations The degree of control exercised over the initial building of houses, subsequent alterations, and the attempts to modify life on the estate through rules and regulations all suggest a paternalistic attitude: that the Cadbury idea of the ideal lifestyle would be

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good for their tenants. The early houses at Bournville were sold on 999-year leases, which enabled Cadbury to use covenants that ensured he could control changes to the houses and estate, and ‘the rural appearance of the district and the comfort of the inhabitants may be enforced’ (quoted in Henderson 1984: 3). When he realised that some houses were being sold on at a profit Cadbury decided to introduce stricter controls to try to prevent speculators moving into the estate, and in 1900 set up the Bournville Village Trust (BVT) as a charity to own and oversee the building and letting of properties (Harrison 1999: 44). Both George and Elizabeth were on the committee, with other members of the family. Along with the building covenants, the tenants were issued with rule books to ‘establish the guidelines for life on the estate’ (Durman and Harrison 1995: 23). The restrictions practised on the estate included the inspection of gardens to make sure they were well kept, as noted above. Similarly, sheds on allotments were a cause for concern and the BVT committee were keen to avoid the ‘unsightly appearance’ that ‘such erections’ might produce (BVT Minutes 20 September 1911).14 Even more intrusive was the inclusion in the lease of the right to inspect premises to check on the condition of paintwork and general state of repair (Bryson and Lowe 2002: 30). Bournville continues to this day to exert a strong control over any external changes to the houses in the village.

Influencing by Example: The Creation of a Show House The idea for a show house was discussed at the BVT committee meeting on 30 October 1901. It is worth quoting the minute in its entirety: The desirability of having a cottage into which visitors can be taken having been felt, it was decided with the consent of the chairman who is building the cottages to arrange with the tenant of one of the new cottages in Bournville Lane to allow visitors to enter and inspect the house in consideration of having the house rent free, or receiving a fee for each party of visitors. It was arranged that the Estate should furnish the house, & W. A. Harvey was desired to design the furniture and submit designs to E. M. Cadbury. (BVT Minutes 30 October 1901) The chairman was, of course, George Cadbury, and E. M. Cadbury was his wife Elizabeth; thus all three protagonists were closely involved from the outset. The reasoning behind the instigation of a show house seems to have been a means of making the interiors of the cottages available for the many visitors – local, national and international – who came for special events such as the first Garden City Association conference, which was held at Bournville in 1901, and more generally as the fame of the village spread in architectural and design circles.15 Visitors came from America, Austria, Russia and Germany, where a number of similar projects were set up, taking inspiration from Bournville (Harrison 1999: 92). In 1902 nearly 4,000 visitors were shown round the factory and the village (Bryson and Lowe 2002: 36). Indeed, Cadbury was so keen to promote his village that he arranged ‘for a whole trainload of journalists to visit’ in 1906 (Durman and Harrison 1995: 25). However, as the village developed, it is clear that the show house was also meant to influence the tenants on the estate.

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Demonstrating furnishing schemes through show houses and mock rooms at exhibitions seem to have started with the nineteenth-century international expositions (Winton 2006). Certainly by the time of the first Ideal Home Exhibition, which combined education with entertainment and commercial enterprise, organised by the Daily Mail in 1908, the most popular aspect with visitors was the show houses (Sugg-Ryan 1997: 5; Benton 2006: 223). In this instance, the show house demonstrated the latest in domestic interiors and new labour-saving equipment. Such levels of consumption remained largely aspirational for most visitors. Later in the twentieth century, various design organisations made use of exhibitions to demonstrate modernist ideas in domestic interior decoration and furnishing, in the hope of persuading people to abandon their love of ponderous and historically styled furnishings. In all of these instances the use of show houses was linked to persuading people to buy a particular style of furniture, and the exhibition was dismantled after a few weeks. None of these show houses were inhabited.16 However, at Bournville the show cottage operated rather differently. Elizabeth selected Mrs Hartle as a suitable tenant, and she was informed of what would be expected of her should she undertake this role. She was to have the house rent free and in return she was ‘expected to be always ready to show it to visitors to the Village’. Mrs Hartle was listed in the 1911 Census at 82 Bournville Lane as Emma Hartles, a 65-year-old widow who worked from home doing ‘plain sewing’; hence her availability to open her home at short notice.17 She had been born in the neighbourhood and no other family members were living on the premises. The arrangement is unlike what is normally meant by a show home; a house open on a temporary basis to the public or paying visitors to sell houses or contents or to convey ideas in an exhibition. This show house was to be lived in long term and yet constantly available to view. Furthermore, Mrs Hartle was expected to live with the furnishings chosen for her and designed by Harvey. Sketches for furniture were produced for the committee’s approval in early 1902, and the cost of furniture along with pictures and carpets was estimated to amount to £37 10s. Mrs Hartle moved into her home in 1902 and the arrangement continued until 1911, when she had become too ill to continue to show visitors round. In the Minutes she was variously described as a tenant, a caretaker and a custodian, which emphasises her role as an employee. When her duties ended it was decided to ‘let it [the house] in the usual course, and if possible to sell the furniture’. This comment seems to assume that Mrs Hartle would move out of the cottage now that she was unable to fulfil her obligations. However, the last note in the Minutes regarding the matter makes it clear that a doctor had been consulted and his diagnosis was that her illness was serious, and the fate of the show cottage was ‘suspended for the time’ (BVT Minutes 10 May 1911). When Mrs Hartle ceased to open the show house it was decided to ‘arrange with some of the residents to admit visitors to view their houses, and payment of 6d. per party to be made from the Trustees special fund. The selection of houses to be left with Mrs Cadbury and the Secretary’ (BVT Minutes 26 April 1911). Therefore Elizabeth Cadbury would continue to oversee the arrangement and ensure that only houses suitable with regard to furnishing and cleanliness, perhaps, would be opened to visitors. Whilst Mrs Hartle acted as caretaker of the show home it was proposed to make improvements to the facilities in the form of a new bath, since it was felt that the

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original sunken bath was no longer representative of the amenities provided in the newer houses, and therefore a new cabinet bath was to be installed (BVT Minutes 6 November 1908).18 However, the Minutes also make clear further interference on the part of the Committee. Perhaps Mrs Hartle could not be trusted to represent the BVT adequately to visitors, and instead the use of guides was approved by George Cadbury. They were to be provided with a typed copy of the following to give as an explanation: As visitors almost invariably ask to see inside one of the cottages, and as the large number of people now visiting the Village make it difficult to allow this without unduly inconveniencing the tenants, arrangements have been made with the occupant of this Cottage to have it always ready for inspection. It is a sample of the newer type of houses now being built in the village. The greater part of the furniture was designed by the Estate architect, it being hoped that such examples might encourage a taste for plain but artistic furniture among those living on the estate. The cost of furnishing the living room and the two bedrooms (including mattresses, pillows, blinds &c.) was £39 16s 6d. (BVT Minutes 27 November 1902) We can now turn to the evidence of what furniture was provided for Mrs Hartle in the show cottage, and how the image of the interiors was presented and preserved in three surviving photographs. Two photographs show views of the living room and the third is of a bedroom. At some time on the back of one photograph has been pencilled the description of the interior as an example of a ‘non-parlour type house’ with stained and varnished woodwork of ‘thick matchboarding and old-fashioned latches. There were ingle-nooks with seats, and plain window seats. The artificial lighting was incandescent gas.’ The casement window is a particular feature in the living room, going round a corner with curtains of a dark, open-weave material without a printed or woven pattern visible (Plate 7). The other architectural feature of the room is the inglenook fireplace, which incorporates a range, plain white or at least lightcoloured tiles and several shelves above (Plate 8). To the left of the fireplace is a door behind which were the stairs.19 To the right is a small lobby area and the front door is just out of the photograph. As well as the built-in seats, the seating furniture that is depicted consists of four varnished Windsor chairs (Plate 7) and one with arm rests. On the floor is a small woven rug with a flat design and in front of the fire is a rag rug. There is a plant stand with octagonal top, with plants displayed on the top and shelf. Further ornaments are displayed on the shelves above the fireplace and on a dresser. On the latter is a decorated, fine china tea set including a teapot, while the former offer most evidence of breaking with Arts and Crafts principles, since they include several Japanese fans and various decorative vases that seem more in keeping with aesthetic taste. The bedroom furniture is exceedingly plain and the inclusion of decoration is minimal. The bare floorboards have a small, thin carpet or linoleum on either side of the bed (Plate 9). The show cottage departs from what many if not most of Bournville’s tenants would have perceived to be an ideal interior. First of all, Mrs Hartle’s home was a five-room, non-parlour house. Housing reformers at the end of the nineteenth century and into the middle of the twentieth century were very much in favour of houses for the working class only having one generous-sized living room, rather than two small

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rooms comprising the everyday living room and a front room kept for ‘best’. This arrangement was seen as detrimental to the health of the inhabitants, since the living room became crowded with furniture and people, and it was a waste of the front parlour, since it was seldom used. Harvey considered the front room to be ‘useless’ in small houses, as it was used ‘chiefly as a store-room for gim-cracks’ and was therefore to be discouraged (Harvey 1906: 31). Most of the housing schemes built by philanthropic and religious organisations such as the Fabians and the Rowntree family, as well as that of the Cadburys, favoured non-parlour houses for the poorer families.This was likewise the arrangement favoured for local authority housing built in the interwar period. The imposition of a single living room disregarded the wishes of workingclass people who longed for a best parlour that could be kept for special occasions as a mark of their respectability. The kind of furniture that was featured in the show cottage also differed fundamentally from what was perceived to be desirable by working-class and lowermiddle-class families. Comparing the furniture displayed in the three photographs with that described and illustrated in advice literature reveals that rather than the smart, polished and upholstered items recommended for living rooms, the show cottage furniture matched that which was suggested for servants or kitchens (Jennings 1902; Elder-Duncan 1907). This discrepancy is also apparent in a comparison between the interior furnishings of 82 Bournville Lane and the furniture displayed in the c. 1900 catalogue of a leading Birmingham furniture retailer. Chamberlain, King and Jones proudly proclaim that they are the sole agent for Morris & Co. products in the Midlands, and their 114-page catalogue reveals a mixture of the aesthetic and historical styles the company had become associated with by that period. The only time that furniture similar to that of the show cottage is illustrated is in the sections that deal with kitchen furniture and ‘Extra strong furniture for hotels, schools, institutes etc. in ash or walnut’ (Chamberlain, King and Jones n.d.: 99–101). The discrepancy is likewise apparent when Harvey’s publication of 1906 is consulted; better-quality and more comfortable furnishings were displayed than those suggested in the show cottage. Rather than an ideal interior, the show cottage was meant to demonstrate cheap, affordable furniture for a particular level of tenant. Those tenants would not have seen the furniture or the lack of a parlour as constituting an ideal home. Our knowledge of the appearance of the interiors of the show home is dependent on the representation of them in three photographs taken by the Birmingham photographer Thomas Lewis. The style of the representation affects our response to them, and that style is strangely bland and non-committal. These are neither family snaps of a home interior nor suggestive of the construction of a lived space to produce a narrative of home life. An analysis of the style of the photography reveals perhaps an attempt to manipulate the image of the interiors, but in such a way as to produce a problematic and ultimately unsatisfactory representation of what the Cadburys were trying to achieve. The photographs might best be described as architectural representations.20 Benton comments on photography becoming the ‘universal medium of architectural representation’ at this time, although architects did not welcome the development since they believed that buildings and interiors needed to be experienced in three dimensions (Benton 2006: 220). Photographs also presented technical problems for showing many of an interior’s qualities; colour and texture were lacking, and the direct light from windows was either inadequate or else harsh and too strong to

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produce a satisfactory print. In addition, a photographic image presented a restricted and narrow view. All of these problems could be avoided in an artist’s watercolour rendering, including the use of a wider angle than was possible in photographs at this time. The architects belonging to the Arts and Crafts Movement much preferred that method of representing their designs (Benton 2006: 225). The black-and-white photographs of the Bournville show house were presumably taken before Mrs Hartle moved into her new home, or at least before she could distribute her belongings sufficiently to alter its pristine and rather bare appearance. Perhaps over her ten-year occupation of the house the interiors became less stark and more homely. What is noteworthy is that the BVT commissioned this photographic record, which preserved an image of the show cottage before it was lived in and was thus devoid of any visible inhabitants. The presence of people and their belongings help to humanise an architectural space, but these interiors are determinedly neutral and the ‘performativity seems to have been downplayed’, unlike the later publicity images produced for BVT by Bill Brandt and others (Berry 2013: 8).21 Lewis produced other photographs of streets and individual houses at Bournville for the BVT, many of which appear in their publications.22 Perhaps the BVT intended to use the images in promotional literature, since Bournville was always promoted actively by Cadbury and the BVT. However, the photographs do not seem ever to have been used for this purpose. The audience for these images is not clear, and perhaps this reflects the dual purpose of the show cottage; it was aimed at informed architects and planners, as well as prospective tenants. The Bournville show house was at odds with what is now normally meant by the term, whether produced for commercial or entertainment purposes: that of an idealised and aspirational interior. By contrast, the rooms in the photographs suggest a blank canvas of basic furnishings but lack personality and do not represent inhabited interiors. They are purely educational, and therefore have something in common with (but pre-date) many exhibitions of prescriptive interiors produced by design and housing reformers in the twentieth century. Their exhibitions were often accompanied by literature featuring interiors with furniture but bereft of any personal affects. One such exhibition was held at Bournville in 1934. The Design and Industries Association (DIA) set up an exhibition that ran for a month on part of the estate; it was called ‘Experiment in Furnishing’ and set out to demonstrate that a house could be furnished simply and in modern good taste for £200, and Elizabeth Cadbury was asked to open the exhibition (Wright 1934). She commented that the objects chosen ‘bore out Ruskin’s dictum that they should “act well, look well, and speak well”’. She also recalled the earlier experiment of the show cottage, which ‘she hoped had had some influence in the same direction as the present example was designed to have’.23 The role of the show cottage at Bournville in the early twentieth century was summed up by Cadbury’s biographer as ‘not a matter in which there could be compulsion on the tenants, but there was suggestion, experiment and some measure of invention’ (Gardiner 1923: 142). However, an area of Bournville that came under closer scrutiny and even some ‘compulsion’ was the provision for retired people in the almshouses built by George Cadbury’s brother Richard. The thirty-three small bungalows designed by E. and A. J. Harper in 1897 formed a quadrangle around an open green. They comprised a living room with a curtained-off bedroom, and a small kitchen and bathroom. The almshouses were completed in 1898 just a few months before Richard died, but he was able to view some of the finished accommodation, including a show house. All the houses

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came ready furnished with ‘good solid oak furniture’ (Williams 1931: 217–18). In this instance the role of a show house was directly linked to setting a good example to the ‘inmates’, as the literature described them. This view is reinforced by the Bournville Almshouse Trust Ladies Visiting Committee, Minutes and Reports.24 The committee, made up mostly of members of the Cadbury family in the early years of the twentieth century, stipulated that members should visit each of the inmates every year with particular regard to seeing that homes were kept clean and well aired. Homes that failed to meet this stipulation in one way or another were often referred to in the Minutes. One report, in particular, revealed the difficulty that the Committee were trying to deal with: A new system of general spring cleaning was instituted in the Spring of this year – and in April every house was thoroughly turned out and cleaned – bedding and carpets beaten etc. A laundry was also established in connection with the Almshouses, with the object of encouraging personal and household cleanliness. Each single inmate is entitled to send to the wash 6 articles per week, and each couple 9 articles. (BATLVC Minutes and Reports 16 October 1903) This makes clear that the Ladies were not happy with the levels of cleanliness and were unwilling to leave the inmates to their own devices, and that enforced cleaning, at least once a year, was required. The inmates were constantly being visited, and however well-meaning it might have been, surveillance was inevitably involved. A report that summarised visiting from March 1903 to March 1904 stated that the Ladies had made 233 visits to individual almshouses, and further visits were made by ‘other people’ – bringing the total number of visits to a staggering 551. However, it was concluded that there had been ‘an improvement on the previous year – although one or two are still less clean and fresh than we should like’.

Conclusion The ideas that governed the early years of Bournville Village at the turn of the century reflected the desperate need for a solution to the housing problems that faced industrialising nations. Regulating the style of architecture and interiors was felt by the Cadburys and Harvey to be the way forward for producing economic and ideal living conditions for working people to lead a healthy life. Their inclusion of a show home demonstrates the innovative nature of the scheme. George and Elizabeth Cadbury recognised that Bournville was a small contribution to rehousing the population in affordable and decent homes; its role was therefore more as an exemplar, but one that had the potential to be far more important, given the right publicity. Bournville was undoubtedly an important experiment in providing low-cost housing, and the ideas it incorporated in the layout of streets and the provision of generous gardens, allotments and open spaces for leisure activities was a forerunner of local authority housing built in the interwar period. However, as many design reformers were to find in the twentieth century, such as the DIA, it is difficult if not impossible to influence taste in home furnishings, and only when furnishings and decoration are forced on tenants is the take-up guaranteed, although even then people will often subvert what is provided.25 In the realm of planning rules that governed the alterations to the exteriors of houses, the BVT were much more successful. One hundred plus years after they were built, the

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houses of Bournville Lane and the other early streets remain much as they were, with alterations kept to a minimum and in keeping with Harvey’s architectural plans. If the rules and regulations are irksome to some, it seems that for many people Bournville Village still provides desirable homes in an attractive setting, since the houses remain popular and command high purchase prices. Perhaps, however, they should now be viewed as conservative housing rather than innovative as they were when first built. While not making a huge difference to the provision of affordable housing for working people, nonetheless, George and Elizabeth Cadbury and W. A. Harvey succeeded in providing, at least for a select few, ideal homes for the twenty-first as well as for the twentieth century.

Notes 1. Local authorities were empowered to provide housing under the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890, but they were not obliged so to do, therefore few houses were actually built. It was not until the Addison Act of 1919 that they were forced to take on this responsibility; see Burnett (1978: 180–1, 221). 2. Introduced in the 1870s, the by-laws stipulated the minimum requirements for housing, and these minimums were often not exceeded. They did, however, provide better standards than houses built back to back or around crowded courts; see Burnett (1978: 156–7). 3. George Cadbury’s brother, Richard, also played a part, but he died suddenly in 1898. 4. There was also some provision made for single women and for retired people. 5. For a comprehensive history of Bournville, see Harrison (1999). 6. The first streets to be laid out were Bournville Lane, Acacia Road, Elm Road, Maple Road, Maryvale Road, Linden Road and Sycamore Road. 7. Early nineteenth-century model villages built by employers for their workers included Akroydon and Saltaire. Bournville’s closer contemporaries were Port Sunlight and New Earswick. Bournville was perhaps unique in not being solely for employees. For the history of model villages, see Darley (1975). For the background to the nineteenth-century reports of housing conditions, see Gaskell (1987) and Burnett (1978). For the development of the Garden City Movement, see Buder (1990). 8. See, for example, Whitehouse (1902) and Dale (1907). 9. Similar problems were encountered in the early years of local authority housing when high standards were followed. Most tenants were lower middle class or artisan class and some had to have a lodger to help pay the rent; see Swenarton (1981). 10. George Cadbury had thought of founding such a village ‘from childhood’ (Sartissian and Heine 1978: 19). 11. Harvey went on to win the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Distinction in Town Planning in 1936 and was a founder member of the national Town Planning Institute; see the Bournville Works Magazine, March 1951: 83–4. 12. Parker and Unwin produced similar designs to Harvey’s in their work at Letchworth Garden City, and Unwin was the architectural advisor to the influential Tudor Waters Report of 1918 (his ideas were set out in his Town Planning in Practice (1909)). 13. Morris & Company went on to produce historical revivalist styles after William Morris was no longer directly involved. 14. All further citations from the Bournville Trust Minutes will be given as ‘BVT Minutes [date]’. The Minutes are held in the Bournville Village Trust Archive, BVT, Bournville. 15. Three hundred delegates attended the conference; see Bryson and Lowe (2002: 37). 16. The modernist Schroder house was inhabited for sixty years, from the 1920s until Truus Schroder died in 1985. However, it was only opened to a ‘restricted’ audience; see Overy (2006: 76).

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17. In the BVT Minutes she is always Mrs Hartle, but in the 1911 Census her name is listed as both Hartle and Hartles. 18. However, the sunken bath was still in place thirty years ago when the present owners moved into the house. I am grateful to Mr Corbett for supplying this information. 19. Floor plans of the cottage and an elevation of a similar ingle are illustrated in Harvey (1906: 54). 20. Thomas Lewis (1844–1913) was involved in the Warwickshire Photographic Survey founded in 1890 to record the changing urban and rural landscape; he produced many images of Birmingham streets. www.libraryofbirmingham.com/warwickshirephotographicsurvey/wps 21. For an example of this use of photography, see Bournville Village Trust (1941). 22. Photographs by Thomas Lewis & Company have a number written on the print in the BVT archive, as do these of the show cottage. 23. See Bournville Works Magazine, May 1934: 148. This issue of the magazine also ran an article comparing fussy Victorian interiors with the exhibition. For more analysis of the exhibition and the article, see Berry (2013: 8–10). 24. Hereafter, BATLVC Minutes and Reports; these documents are also held in the Bournville Village Trust Archive, BVT, Bournville. 25. See the essays in Attfield (2007).

Works Cited Abercrombie, P. (1910–11), ‘Modern Town Planning in England. A Comparative Review of “Garden City” Schemes in England’, Town Planning Review, 1: 18–38. Attfield, J. (2007), Bringing Modernity Home: Writings on Popular Design and Material Culture, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Benton, T. (2006), ‘The Twentieth-Century Architectural Interior: Representing Modernity’, in J. Aynsley and C. Grant with H. McKay (eds), Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance, London: V&A Publications, pp. 220–39. Berry, F. (2013), ‘Homes on Show: Bournville Village Trust, Feminine Agency and the Performance of Suburban Domesticities’, Suburban Birmingham: Spaces and Places, 1880–1960, www.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk Bournville Village Trust (1941), When We Build Again: A Study Based on Research into Conditions of Living and Working in Birmingham, London: George Allen and Unwin. Bryson, J. R. and P. A. Lowe (2002), ‘Story-Telling and History Construction: Rereading George Cadbury’s Bournville Model Village’, Journal of Historical Geography, 28. 1: 21–41. Buder, S. (1990), Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnett, J. (1978), A Social History of Housing 1815–1970, Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Chamberlain, King and Jones (n.d.), Furniture and Decoration, Birmingham: Cond Bros. V&A, National Art Library, TC.B0074. Cooper, J. (1988), Victorian and Edwardian Furniture and Interiors, London: Thames and Hudson. Corley, T. A. B. (1988), ‘How Quakers Coped with Business Success: Quaker Industrialists 1860–1914’, in D. J. Jeremy (ed.), Business and Religion in Britain, Aldershot: Gower, pp. 164–87. Crawford, A. (1984), ‘Introduction’, in A. Crawford (ed.), By Hammer and Hand: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Birmingham, Birmingham: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Dale, J. A. (1907), ‘Bournville’, Economic Review, 17. 1: 13–27. Darley, G. (1975), Villages of Vision, London: Architectural Press. Durman, M. and M. Harrison (1995), Bournville 1895–1914: The Model Village and its Cottages, Birmingham: University of Central England. Elder-Duncan, J. H. (1907), The House Beautiful and Useful, London: Cassell.

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Gardiner, A. G. (1923), The Life of George Cadbury, London: Cassell. Gaskell, S. M. (1987), Model Housing from the Great Exhibition to the Festival of Britain, London and New York: Mansell. Gere, C. and L. Hoskins (2000), The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior, Aldershot: Lund Humphries. Harrison, M. (1999), Model Village to Garden Suburb, Chichester: Phillimore. Harvey, W. A. (1906), The Model Village and its Cottages: Bournville, London: BT Batsford. Henderson, P. F. A. (1984), Ninety Years On: An Account of the Bournville Village Trust, Bournville: Bournville Village Trust. Howard, E. (1946), Bournville Village Trust: A Summary Description of its Organisation, Activities and Purposes, Bournville: Bournville Estate Office. Jennings, H. J. (1902), Our Homes and How to Beatify Them, 2nd edn, London: Harrison and Sons. Kennedy, C. (2000), The Merchant Princes: Family, Fortune and Philanthropy: Cadbury, Sainsbury and John Lewis, London: Hutchinson. Overy, P. (2006), ‘The Restoration of Modern Life: Interwar Houses on Show in the Netherlands’, in P. Sparke, B. Martin and T. Keeble (eds), The Modern Period Room: The Construction of the Exhibited Interior 1870–1950, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 73–86. Sartissian, W. and W. Heine (1978), Social Mix: The Bournville Experience, Bournville and Adelaide: BVT and South Australian Housing Trust. Scott, R. (1955), Elizabeth Cadbury 1858–1951, London: George G. Harrap. Sugg-Ryan, D. (1997), The Ideal Home through the Twentieth Century, London: Hazar. Swenarton, M. (1981), Homes Fit for Heroes, London: Heinemann. Thompson, F. M. L. (2003), Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain 1780–1980, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Unwin, R. and B. Parker (1901), The Art of Building a Home, London: Longman, Green. Whitehouse, J. H. (1902), ‘Bournville: A Study in Housing Reform’, Studio, 24: 162–72. Williams, I. A. (1931), The Firm of Cadbury 1830–1931, London: Constable. Winton, A. G. (2006), ‘“A man’s house is his art”: The Walker Art Center’s Ideal House Project and the Marketing of Domestic Design, 1941–7’, in P. Sparke, B. Martin and T. Keeble (eds), The Modern Period Room: The Construction of the Exhibited Interior 1870–1950, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 87–111. Wright, H. G. (1934), ‘Two Hundred Pounds: An Experiment in Furnishing’, Design for Today, 11. 13: 177–83.

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12 Theatre in the Provinces at the Fin de Siècle: Beyond Outcast London Jo Robinson

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s chapter 1 by Kirsten McLeod shows, temporally speaking, the boundaries of the fin de siècle have become extremely elastic. Other contributions to this volume similarly aim to expand our understanding of the geography of the period, examining what the fin de siècle meant in countries such as Ireland or Scotland, Italy or Russia. This chapter also addresses matters of geography, specifically in relation to our understanding of late nineteenth-century theatre, which to date has been dominated by a concern either with the London versus Parisian stage or, as in Heidi J. Holder’s work, with the connections between ‘exaggerations of Melvillian melodrama [at the Standard Theatre in the 1890s, with] its fantastic, even nightmarish violations of class boundaries’, and ‘the work of reformist playwrights such as Shaw, Harley Granville Barker, and the feminist playwright Cecily Hamilton’ (Holder 2004: 274). However, if we look beyond the twin poles of Holder’s concern with West End and Outcast London, there seems to have been little consideration of what fin-de-siècle theatre meant in England as a whole. In the next section of this chapter, I therefore make the case for considering what new questions a spatialisation of the fin de siècle, in addition to the usual focus on periodisation, might bring to scholarship on the period. As with Margaret Ponsonby’s contribution to this volume, I do so by travelling beyond London to the regions, focusing on the Midland cities of Birmingham and Nottingham.1 Examining theatrical repertoire and structures of touring, as well as debates in local newspaper columns and elsewhere, I use these twin case studies to consider the extent to which the concerns of the period – particularly in relation to the ‘new drama’ – were taken up (or not) beyond London, asking the question: was the fin de siècle solely a formation of, or determined by, events in metropolitan capitals?

Fin-de-Siècle Geographies In The Cambridge Introduction to Historiography, Thomas Postlewait notes that periodization is always more than a descriptive matter because it is a process of concept formation, an ordering process imposed upon the historical data. It is a form of representation, a ‘representing’ that must necessarily balance between documentation and interpretation, reconstruction and deconstruction. (Postlewait 2009: 191)

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Walter Laqueur’s claim that the fin de siècle ‘has meant and still means a great variety of things’ drives this point home, offering a range of representations and descriptions that have been called into play at different times and by different people: In France it signified to be fashionable, modern, up to date, recherché, sophisticated. It has also been a synonym for morbidity, decline, decadence, cultural pessimism. On occasion it has stood for symbolism, aestheticism, l’art pour l’art, narcissism. There was usually a frivolous connotation – of fashionable dejection but not of total despair. (Laqueur 1996: 5) Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst also highlight ‘a constellation of new formations’, listing ‘the new woman, the new imperialism, the new realism, the new drama, and the new journalism, all arriving alongside “new” human sciences like psychology, psychical research, sexology, and eugenics’ (Ledger and Luckhurst 2000: xiii). Of the key topics and ideas in that list, the emphasis on the new woman and the new drama points us towards figures such as Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, with Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones offering Englishinflected responses to those Norwegian and Irish playwrights, as representative theatrical figures of the period. Thus Katherine Newey, for example, conventionally emphasises the central role of Ibsen’s plays and the series of performances that took place in London from 1889 onwards, and which reflected the view of various ‘British cultural and literary radical elites’ that Ibsen ‘was a questioning and radical social thinker, grounding his social critiques in the drawing rooms, behaviour and language of the fin de siècle middle class, with all its anxieties about money, status and sex’ (Newey 2006: 37). This sense of Ibsen as representative of fin-de-siècle concerns has, of course, a long pedigree, having been recognised in the 1890s moment itself by Max Nordau in his Degeneration, first published in Germany in 1892 and translated into English in 1895. Nordau dedicates a whole chapter to ‘Ibsenism’ and the Norwegian writer, who with his ‘mental stigmata’ – ‘his theological obsessions of original sin, of confession and redemption, the absurdities of his invention, the constant contradiction in his uncertain opinions, his vague or senseless modes of expression, his onomatomania and his symbolism’ – ‘might be numbered among the mystic degenerates’ that Nordau identifies as representative of the age (Nordau 1968: 396). This chapter, too, takes Ibsen as representative of fin-de-siècle ideas, but I aim to expand Newey’s and Nordau’s frames of reference to investigate the geography of those ideas beyond the London metropolis. In this respect, it is worth noting in passing that the repeated focus on the ‘new’ in Ledger and Luckhurst’s list aptly reflects the dominance of temporal (rather than spatial) thinking in and about the period. This is evidenced not just by the adoption of the chronological naming of the ‘constellation of new formations’ in relation to the forthcoming end of the century, but also, as A. L. Morton has argued, by utopian writing of the period, and especially in the work of Edward Bellamy and William Morris, where, according to Morton, we find a shift from a concern with place to that of time, from the geographies of ‘blank spaces on the map’ to ‘the more or less distant future’ (Morton 1969: 192). However, as William James pointed out in his 1908 lecture ‘A Pluralistic Universe’, thinking about time also necessarily involves thinking

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about space. While ‘conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other; unity excludes plurality . . . in the real concrete sensible flux of life, experiences co-penetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded and what not’ (James 1909: 253–4). In their introduction to the Atlas of Industrializing Britain, 1780–1914, John Langton and R. J. Morris identify three spatial processes working to ‘confound and complement each other’ across the long nineteenth century, the first and third of which resonate particularly strongly in relation to the theatre culture of the 1890s: First, there was a continuing core–periphery relationship between metropolitan and provincial Britain. Then, there was the pattern of the resource-based industrial development of areas rich in water, power, coal and other minerals, which lay along the junction of the highland and lowland zones. Other processes were always operating at a smaller scale to link the way in which people think, act and organise themselves, through their work, daily routines and relationships, to the resources of their immediate environment. (Langton and Morris 1986: xxvii) In relation to these comments it is useful to return briefly to Newey’s essay; in a footnote she explains the deliberation in her use of the term ‘English theatre’: My focus is on the theatre industry in London from 1880. London’s position as a metropolitan centre of the hegemonic culture of Britain (that is, English culture) at the time suggests that it is more accurate to refer to ‘English theatre’ than to assume that London was representative of the theatrical culture of all of Great Britain. As various postcolonial theorists observe, we must start to see ‘Englishness’ as a specific ethnic identity, rather than as normative. (Newey 2006: 45, n.1) While Newey is careful to distinguish between ‘English’ and ‘British’, her focus on the ‘hegemonic’ position of London theatrical culture actually underlines the need for a further set of distinctions when discussing the theatrical culture of the fin de siècle, if we are to avoid what Claire Cochrane has identified as an ‘unselfconscious provincialism’ that ‘has driven much British theatre history to skew the record towards the assumption that everything important in British theatre happened in London’ (Cochrane 2011: 2; 3). Clearly, London is important, not least (as Newey notes), as the site of multiple first productions of Ibsen’s plays and other new drama by the Independent Theatre Society and its fellow theatrical pioneers in the early 1890s. But I want to argue for an exploration of the geography of the English fin de siècle beyond London; and to reintroduce space to the temporal thinking about the period, exploring the ways in which the ideas listed by Laqueur, Ledger and Luckhurst were shared and discussed across England, if not the whole of Great Britain. Thus while acknowledging that what happened in the regions was partly informed by London – because London, as Cochrane argues, becomes ‘Lefebvre’s “dominant form of space”, which extends across national spaces, infiltrates the periphery and is capable of suppressing and limiting independent creativity’ (Cochrane 2011: 14) – I will also pay attention to the mix of ‘work, daily routines and relationships’ that characterises the leisure and entertainment resources of the two Midlands cities, Birmingham and Nottingham, which form

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my case studies. Did any of the clamour of degeneration and change so often identified in relation to the new writers and new characters of the London stage in the period, not least that of the ‘new woman’, reach the stages of these Midlands cities? If so, how were they received and discussed there?

East and West Midlands: Regional and National Cultures Of the Midlands cities that I focus on, Birmingham, in the West Midlands, had a population of 522,204 by 1901; for Nottingham, in the East Midlands, the same census recorded a population just under half that of Birmingham’s: 239,743. By the 1890s there were two main theatres in Nottingham: the Theatre Royal in Theatre Square, just above the town’s central Market Place, which had opened in 1865 with a production of The School for Scandal, and the Grand Theatre, Hyson Green, which opened in February 1886 when J. W. Turner’s Opera Company produced Maritana. Nottingham historian John Beckett comments that the Grand flourished under the management of J. R. Mulholland from 1888 to the mid-1890s, but that after Mulholland left the quality of productions declined and the Grand became chiefly a home of melodrama, ‘which may have been more suited to the tastes of its predominantly working-class audience’ (Beckett 2006: 406): any serious drama of the fin de siècle was therefore likely to be produced at the Theatre Royal. Close by that theatre, in Market Street, the Palace offered music hall variety turns; at the end of the decade, in 1898, the Empire Theatre of Varieties was opened adjoining the Theatre Royal, designed by Frank Matcham, who had also carried out a refurbishment of the Theatre Royal the previous year. At the start of the 1890s, then, Nottingham had a number of venues catering for local theatrical tastes. With its larger population, Birmingham provided a still wider choice of theatrical establishments for its citizens. The Theatre Royal on New Street, founded in 1773, had for the first part of the nineteenth century stood alone in the city, but in 1856 it was joined by the Prince of Wales Theatre on Broad Street, and in 1883 the Grand Theatre opened at the corner of Corporation Street and James Watt Street. The Grand was like Nottingham’s Grand Theatre – a melodrama house, according to Derek Salberg, historian of the Birmingham theatres, who cites a ‘somewhat facetious Victorian critic’ as claiming that ‘If the manager of the Grand introduced a troupe of flying gymnasts into “The Lady of Lyons”, or a couple of comic songs into the most dramatic play, the patrons of the Grand would not resent it’ (Salberg 1980: 69). Local newspapers and periodicals – including the Nottingham Evening Post, Birmingham Daily Post, Birmingham Pictorial and Dart and Birmingham Owl – all carried regular advertisements for, and reviews of, performances at these and other venues in each city. However, although each city had a distinct local performance and social culture, formed by the relationship between its main theatres and smaller entertainment venues, as well as in the circles of shared knowledge created by newspapers, periodicals, libraries and public lectures, it should be acknowledged that by the 1890s, neither Nottingham nor Birmingham can be said to have existed in isolation. The railways enabled residents to travel to London, and more importantly (for the purposes of my argument), facilitated the travel of different theatre companies to both cities, from the metropolis and elsewhere. By the 1890s, both cities had well-established railway links to London: even though E. Foxwell and T. C. Farrer note with surprise in their

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1881 Express Trains English and Foreign that while Birmingham ‘once enjoyed the full blaze of railway speed; now it is left out in the cold, on a neglected “siding” ’, there were express trains that ran between London Euston and Birmingham in just under 3 hours, while express trains from Nottingham to St Pancras took 2 hours and 25 minutes (Foxwell and Farrer 1964: 416). By the 1890s, too, the structures of the theatrical landscape meant that both Nottingham and Birmingham were part of a shared national theatrical culture: each city was integrally embedded in the expanded networks of performance represented by the journeyings of the touring companies that the railways had made possible. At its most extreme, the speed of such connections is evidenced on the occasional playbills of the Birmingham Theatre Royal which advertised special matinees (usually at increased prices) that took advantage of the improving railway connections between Birmingham and the capital. On these occasions, as with the visit of Frederick Harrison and Company from the Haymarket Theatre in London to perform the new play The Alchemist by Osmond Shillingford on the afternoon of Thursday 25 March 1897, the London company advertised that ‘The Entire Company will return to the Haymarket Theatre in time for the Evening Performance of “Under the Red Robe”.’2 The Theatre Royal’s position on New Street, close by the city’s main railway station, perhaps made such ventures particularly manageable for visiting companies, but in his commemorative history of the Birmingham Theatre Royal, R. Crompton Rhodes emphasises that by the 1890s a touring economy was dominant, having replaced earlier, local companies: thus while ‘as late as the ’eighties, in “classical” repertory, it was quite frequent for local favourites to appear in special parts . . . after 1878 the stock-company was no longer in existence’ (Rhodes 1924: 38). Certainly by the end of the 1890s, apart from in some cases locally produced pantomimes, the theatres of both cities were inextricably intertwined in a web of intertheatrical relationships between London and the provinces, with product flowing from core to periphery: As receiving houses or touring venues, the vast majority of theatres were effectively retail outlets, trading goods manufactured elsewhere. . . . [I]n order to secure nationwide product dissemination and enable audiences from Belfast to Dublin, to Swansea, to Liverpool, to Edinburgh, to Aberdeen, etc., the play would be toured with the stars. . . . The prevailing metropolitan theatre aesthetic, imbricated with dominant societal values, could circulate nations-wide. (Cochrane 2011: 28–9) Where Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ originally drew on the role of national print cultures in shaping shared understandings of nations (Anderson 2006), here it is possible to argue that the country-crossing tours of theatrical productions, largely emanating from the successful commercial theatres of the West End, created a shared theatrical culture, certainly between the core metropolis and the No. 1 towns and cities on the theatrical touring circuit. Following Anderson, Jen Harvie suggests that within the imagining of the nation in the contemporary period there may reside ‘numerous different and . . . more important identities – local, urban, rural, national, regional, ethnic, diasporic, and so on’ (Harvie 2005: 3); in the late nineteenth century, I would argue, newspapers and theatrical tours created national imagined communities and regional and local ones. Periodicals such as the Dart and the Owl offered both ‘Whispers from North Warwickshire’ and ‘Chat

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from Edgbaston’, and commentary on the touring productions at the Theatre Royal and the Prince of Wales which situated both cities within the mesh of the Londoncentred ‘English culture’ that Newey describes. Every week another company would visit each theatre, and every week the playbills announced connections with other places and venues. ‘Dorothy’, visiting the Birmingham Theatre Royal in April and September 1890, had by September ‘been played to Crowded Houses in London upwards of 1,000 times, and about 2,000 times in the Provinces’; in 1982 ‘A Royal Divorce!’ came ‘supported by an unusually strong Company, from the Royal Princess’s Theatre, London, where it has been played for 350 nights, and was seen by over 1,000,000 people’.3 At the same time, readers were kept up to date by the local press with theatrical happenings in London: columns headed ‘London Gossip’ and ‘Metropolitan Notes’ in the Nottingham Evening Post highlighted critics’ divided reactions to the revival of Henry Irving’s Macbeth in January 1889, for example. To look at the geography of the fin de siècle in relation to these Midlands cities, then, is to examine how far the drama of that period and the various ideas that accompanied it – ‘the new woman, the new imperialism, the new realism’ and the other ‘new’ elements from Ledger and Luckhurst’s list – became part of, or challenged, the dominant aesthetic which Cochrane describes as ‘circulating nations-wide’ at the end of the nineteenth century. To what extent was that ‘new drama’ identified with the innovations of the fin de siècle performed or parodied in the venues of the ‘periphery’; and how soon did such performances follow their premieres in the theatres of the metropolis? In the next sections I look at the extent of the ‘reach’ into the provinces – that is, into Nottingham and Birmingham – of the works of Ibsen and Pinero, the latter having been widely seen (with works such as The Second Mrs Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith) as one of the British champions of the new social realism represented by Ibsen’s theatre.

Ibsen in the Provinces On 7 June 1889, the same day that Janet Achurch’s and Charles Charrington’s staging of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House opened in London, Nottingham theatregoers might have been tempted by a production of The Golden Goblin at the Theatre Royal, while Edward Barrett’s No. 1 Dramatic Company performed in the ‘thrilling comedy drama, Tempest Tossed’, at the Grand. In Birmingham, the ‘popular actor Mr W. H. Hallatt and his Dramatic Company’ were performing the ‘New Realistic Drama, entitled Is Life worth Living?’ at that city’s Theatre Royal. The ‘new realism’ of this drama was, however, likely to be of a rather limited nature compared to the work of Ibsen being performed by Achurch and Charrington: the Nottingham Evening Post had described it earlier in the year as ‘a melodrama of the realistic school’ in which the playwright ‘makes strong demands upon the credulity of his audience’ (26 March: 4). In contrast, the first report of the London Ibsen production in the Nottingham Evening Post in June 1889 punningly stressed the ‘novelty’ of the endeavour: Ibsen’s play ‘The Doll’s House’ at the Novelty Theatre – how appropriate the locale – has variously affected the London critics. The consensus of opinion is that the clever Scandinavian has something new to show, and something fresh to teach, but that striking and stirring as is his remarkable play, it is not quite suited to the English palate. . . . The play has been so much discussed, that general interest

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has been aroused in it, and it will keep the Novelty boards some weeks longer. (Nottingham Evening Post, 17 June: 4) As Newey’s essay cited above makes clear, the Achurch and Charrington staging was, within the next few years, swiftly followed by a number of other productions of Ibsen’s plays in London. A Doll’s House was produced by different companies in January and June 1891, ran for another thirty performances in a revived production with Achurch and Charrington in April and May 1892, and was again revived in March 1893. Rosmersholm was produced by F. R. Benson and Florence Farr in February 1891 and then staged several times in 1893, including a production led by Beerbohm Tree at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. The infamous Independent Theatre Society production of Ghosts took place at the Royalty Theatre in March 1891; Elizabeth Robins and Marion Lea’s production of Hedda Gabler ran for thirty-seven performances in April and May the same year and was revived by Robins in May 1893; The Lady from the Sea was produced at Terry’s Theatre in May 1891, and The Master Builder was produced several times at different theatres with Robins in the role of Hilda Wangel in the first months of 1893. With these records of production in mind, it is perhaps understandable that Newey’s discussion of Ibsen in the English theatre is – in respect of the nineteenth century at least – focused on the London theatre. Indeed, if we take 1895 – the date proposed by John Stokes (1992) and Richard Ellmann (1988) as the end date of the decadent nineties, as marked by Oscar Wilde’s arrest and imprisonment – the reach of the fin-de-siècle drama of Ibsen seems firmly contained within the geography of the capital, at least in terms of productions and performances. Tracy C. Davis does identify one early performance of Ibsen beyond London – that of Marie Fraser in A Doll’s House in Edinburgh in 1890 – but she notes that although George Bernard Shaw ‘mentioned that [Fraser] spoke wildly of producing The Wild Duck and The Lady from the Sea in London and the provinces . . . nothing came of it’ (Davis 1984: 137). The first sustained tour of Ibsen beyond London did not take place until 1897, when Achurch and Charrington, under the name of the ‘Independent Theatre Company’, began an extensive tour of the provinces with their by now celebrated production of A Doll’s House. Starting at the Globe Theatre in London on 10 May 1897, they toured to a variety of regional towns and cities, with advertisements and notices of ‘Provincial Theatricals’ in the Era making it possible to identify a route which included Aberdeen and Dundee (in Scotland), Newcastleon-Tyne, Leamington Spa, Eastbourne, Brighton, Dover, Folkestone, Bromley, Ryde, Sandown, Worthing, Balham and Cambridge (in England). The tour did not visit Birmingham, but the company did perform at the Theatre Royal Nottingham from 13 to 15 September 1897 (see Plate 10). Looking at the commentary on this tour in the Era, it is clear that by 1897, this particular Ibsen play is seen as well established; indeed, in the words of the reviewer of the Globe revival, ‘the time is past when any discussion of Ibsen’s play . . . could be otherwise than stale and superfluous’: Since the production of a translation of A Doll’s House at the Novelty Theatre in the June of 1890 [sic], the English public, including those who have never seen the piece, has been made well acquainted with the lines of argument taken by the counsel for the prosecution and that for the defence; and the fact that A Doll’s House has been cheaply published has made it easy for anyone to become familiar with the text. (15 May: 10)

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By this time, too, Achurch and Charrington’s relationship with the play was well known: the Era advertisement of the start of the tour, inviting applications from theatre managers for vacant dates, highlighted Achurch’s role as Nora Helmer, ‘as Played by her in London, and upwards of 200 Nights in America, India, Australasia, Egypt, &c.’ (17 July: 4). Thus, by the time that provincial audiences were able to see Ibsen on stage in their own towns and cities, the ‘new drama’ was rather less than new, and Achurch and Charrington’s production was presumably seen by those managers who made a booking for their theatres as at least a reasonably viable commercial proposition, rather than a socially challenging one. Indeed, the reviewer of the Aberdeen performances noted that ‘the somewhat hazardous experiment has been fully justified by its success’ (31 July 1897: 20) and at the end of the tour, the ‘Theatrical Gossip’ column in the Era noted that the tour that was closing in Cambridge that week was ‘originally intended to travel only for six weeks, but the result encouraged the company to extend its operations. . . . [They] have met with success in most of the cities where they have been produced’ (30 October: 12). However, reports of the tour do perhaps further complicate the sense of core and periphery – London and elsewhere – that formed part of the initial emphasis of this chapter’s exploration of the space of the fin de siècle: in ‘The London Theatres’ report of 24 July 1897, the reviewer of the production’s visit to the Grand Theatre, Islington, noted that ‘To try Ibsen in Islington is a rather risky experiment, for suburban theatre-goers as a body fight shy of the Norwegian dramatist’s plays’ (8). While the success of certain key plays – not least Achurch’s production of A Doll’s House, with its international touring highlighted above – did move them beyond the space of the special matinee on borrowed stages in the West End, the early geography of performances of Ibsen’s new drama in England appears to have been an extremely limited one. However, other evidence suggests that even if the plays themselves could not be seen by audiences in either Nottingham or Birmingham until later in the decade or, in the latter case, until the early years of the twentieth century, the ideas represented by those plays – and by the fervour of the early Ibsenites – did find their way beyond London and into the provinces in a variety of ways. In addition to the reviews and notices that accompanied each performance of an Ibsen play in the ‘London Gossip’ or ‘London Correspondence’ columns, in early 1890 Birmingham newspapers carried notices from the publisher Walter Scott that, having come to an arrangement with Henrik Ibsen ‘(at present the most widely discussed of European writers) he will publish a uniform and authoritative edition in English of Ibsen’s Prose Plays, of which so much is everywhere being said and written’ (Birmingham Daily Post, 1 March 1890: 7). In October 1890 members of the ‘Pen and Pencil Club’ were treated to a review of the ‘eight plays which form the group of social dramas given to the world by the eminent Norwegian during the last few years’ by Mr Kineton Parkes, the art editor of Indrasil, at the Colonnade Hotel, and by 1891 it is clear that Ibsen and his ideas are familiar currency for the readers of these cities’ newspapers and periodicals: the review of ‘Periodicals for March’ in the Birmingham paper highlights articles in the Contemporary Review (on Brand), the Atlantic Monthly (where ‘for those who care for Ibsen and his hereditary theories, a paper summing up some views on the subject may be recommended’), and Time, where ‘our townsman’ Mr Kineton Parkes’s lecture had evidently been turned into an enthusiastic essay on the ‘Social Dramas of Henrik Ibsen’, and Israel Zangwill and Eleanor M. Aveling

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‘give us what professes to be a reconstruction of “The Doll’s house: Ibsen improved and purified” ’ (Birmingham Daily Post, 7 March 1891: 9). We have already seen that the Nottingham Evening Post’s ‘Metropolitan Notes’ column brought regular commentary on productions of Ibsen and their effects to their readers, highlighting the ‘Ibsen Boom’ in August 1889 and commenting in November that same year that ‘it is the fashion just now to admire, or pretend to admire’ him (9 August: 2; 30 November: 2). Certainly some in Nottingham were clearly interested in finding out more. The supplementary catalogue and the proposal books of Nottingham’s Bromley House, established as a private subscription library in 1816, show both what people were borrowing from the library and what they wanted the library to buy: the library purchased Scott’s edition of Ibsen’s plays in November 1891, in what seems to have been at the time a rare purchase of dramatic works.4 As the decade progressed, the local press of both cities certainly assumed a familiarity with, and knowledge of, Ibsen’s plays and ideas and were able to deploy these for the amusement of their readers, as a satirical note in the ‘Limelights and Shadows’ column of the weekly periodical The Birmingham Owl in September 1895 demonstrates. Preaching ‘a little homily on the different positions of the Magdalen in the unwholesome New Drama and the “breezy, healthy” Old Ditto’, the anonymous writer notes that: in nearly every Adelphi or Drury Lane Melodrama there is a seduced girl, who moves about the first two or three acts in a white gown, with reddened eyes and a general air of exasperating meekness. And everybody is kind to this girl – poor thing! . . . And it is fifty to one that toward the end of the fourth or fifth act that her rustic lover (whom she coolly jilted, mark you, to go and get ruined by the rich aristocrat) will come forward and say that after all he still loves her, and there is always a home, etc., etc. And everybody weeps and says how beautiful it is. This, mark you, is the ‘wholesome, breezy, honest, English’ melodrama. Now let us look elsewhere. What happens to the Magdalen of the New Drama? She is an outcast and a pariah. Friends shrink from her; her sweetheart leaves her in horror when the ‘Past’ comes out; nobody wants to ‘avenge’ her a bit! And as the curtain falls she lies stark from poison self-administered, or goes to her death amid the ‘white horses’ of the millstream. Or, may be, she leaves the world in another way, and retires to a convent, or an isolated parsonage in the wilds of Yorkshire. And as for marrying her and covering up her sin – good heavens! Nobody ever dreams of it. Once a sinner, she is always a sinner. And this, mark you, is the ‘scrofulous, sickly, unhealthy’ New Drama! Well, I dunno. (20 September 1895: 10) The satire is worth quoting at length, as the references to the various ‘endings’ available to the ‘Magdalen of the New Drama’ clearly assume – and require – a knowledge of these kinds of plays from the periodical’s readership: the poison that kills the second Mrs Tanqueray in Arthur Wing Pinero’s eponymous play, the parsonage that awaits the heroine of the same playwright’s The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, and the white horses that accompany the suicide leap of Rosmer and Rebecca West in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. All of which suggests that Ibsen’s ideas – and the ideas of the wider drama of the fin de siècle, and in particular its characterisations of the ‘new

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woman’ – were indeed circulating across the provinces, even if the drama itself was not able to make the journey. Similarly, an item in the Nottingham Evening Post on 14 May 1891 praises Ibsen for introducing a new euphemism to the English language in Hedda Gabler, noting that ‘if it is wished to convey the impression that [a man] has been dining rather freely the correct fashion is to say that he has “vine leaves in his hair” ’ (2). Again, the same issue of the Birmingham Owl that contained the reflection on the Madgalen of drama old and new also contained a short poem, ‘The Modern Maid’, which offered up another, more comic version of the new woman: I am a-weary, mother dear, Enfeebled and o’erworn, I cannot wield a broom, I fear, Nor pull and husk the corn. ... Thus spake the maiden, gave a cough To strengthen her appeal Then donned her bloomers and rode off Ten miles upon her wheel. (20 September 1895: 12) This and other similar sketches and poems in both the Owl and its fellow weekly periodical the Birmingham Pictorial and Dart throughout the early years of the 1890s make it clear that the notions of the fin de siècle were common currency, familiar enough to be recognised for the purpose of a joke or to be appropriately and punningly transformed into a ‘fan de cycle’. Other notices, such as those for the Birmingham and Midland Institute lecture series of 1895–6 on Robert Louis Stevenson by the critic, author and Ibsen translator Edmund Gosse, and on ‘The Literature of Decadence’ by Henry Duff Traill, later author of The New Fiction and Other Essays on Literary Subjects (1897), confirm that by the mid-1890s, the culture of fin-de-siècle ideas, if not actual performances, was to some extent a shared one between London, Birmingham and Nottingham. But despite the shared knowledge, in most cases the newspaper columns and sketches indicated that what was being reported was happening elsewhere: reports in the Nottingham papers were headed ‘Metropolitan Notes’ or ‘London Gossip’, and in the Birmingham press the city’s readers found out about these movements via columns entitled ‘London Correspondence’. A distance was thus maintained between the fin-de-siècle ‘there’ and the life of the provincial cities’ citizens ‘here’: a reading of such columns suggests that despite what I have earlier described as a shared national theatrical culture created by the dominant structure of touring companies in the late nineteenth century, the core–periphery relationship firmly situated the new movements as ‘elsewhere’ to the cultural life of Nottingham and Birmingham.

Pinero in the Provinces In terms of the new drama, while Ibsen’s plays did not travel beyond London to the rest of Great Britain until the 1897 Achurch and Charrington tour discussed above, the plays of the fin-de-siècle English writers highlighted by Stokes (2007) – Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones – made considerably more rapid transfers to the provinces. To a modern eye, this may be because compared to the controversies of

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Ibsen’s drama, even their ‘problem plays’, such as Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) and Jones’s The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), seem, as Stokes points out, to be ‘at most, Ibsen spin-offs that lack the boldness to go all the way, aesthetic compromises with the very idea of social crisis’ (Stokes 2007: 208). Similar views were of course being expressed as early as 1895 by Shaw in his Saturday Review columns, with his critical assessment famously being amplified later in Plays for Puritans: it seemed . . . [to Pinero and his followers] that most of Ibsen’s heroines were naughty ladies. And they tried to produce Ibsen’s plays by making their heroines naughty. But they took great care to make them pretty and expensively dressed. (Shaw 1932: 44–8; 1901: 18) However, Joel Kaplan makes the point that in the early 1890s, until Shaw’s intervention, ‘critics from the liberal [William] Archer to the reactionary [Clement] Scott had identified Pinero as the face of English Ibsenism, praising or damning him accordingly’ (Kaplan 2004: 426–7). Thus the movement and reception of Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray in the twin provincial cities considered below can perhaps provide a useful contrasting case study with that of Ibsen. The papers in Birmingham and Nottingham both reported enthusiastic audiences for the play, which opened at the St James’s Theatre in London on 27 May 1893, with the Nottingham ‘London Gossip’ column noting that in incompetent hands it would disgust rather than interest, but Mr. Pinero’s treatment of the incidents of the play is so masterly, and his characterisation and dialogue are so brilliant, that on Saturday night the audience were held spell-bound by the fascination of the piece. (Nottingham Evening Post, 29 May 1893: 2) In contrast to the time taken before Ibsen’s work reached the provinces, it was not long before the London Correspondent of the Birmingham Daily Post reported that Birmingham will be afforded in September an opportunity for seeing Mr Pinero’s latest and perhaps greatest play, ‘The Second Mrs Tanqueray’, which is still running with undiminished success at the St. James’s, for in that month Mr George Alexander will visit your city with the entire company from this theatre. (17 July 1893: 4) Pinero’s play thus began a tour of the provinces only four months after its premiere in London.5 A. E. W. Mason notes that this was the result of the manager, ‘following the example of his great chief, Henry Irving, . . . steadily working up, by successive tours, a close connection with the playgoers of the great provincial towns’ (Mason 1935: 63). Such an observation suggests that Pinero’s plays benefited from being produced by a manager and company that were already embedded in the existing culture of production and touring that linked London and the provinces (and was highlighted earlier), unlike the companies that often came together on a temporary basis to perform the plays of Ibsen – such as that of Robins and Lea for Hedda Gabler in 1891. Alexander had visited the Theatre Royal Birmingham in September 1890 with ‘the new farcical comedy Dr Bill’; played at the Prince of Wales’ Theatre in September 1891 with The Idler, before returning with Dr Bill to the Theatre Royal in October the same year; and

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went back to the Prince of Wales’ in September 1892 with Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Idler, when the Birmingham Daily Post reminded its readers that: Never in the history of the local stage has notable success been so quickly and meritoriously won as by Mr. George Alexander. Of course we have known him for a long time. We remember him from the days when he was a clever member of Mr. T. W. Robertson’s company, down to the time when, four years ago, he was the capable lieutenant of Mr. Henry Irving. (13 September 1892: 8) Alexander seems to have brought to Birmingham – and no doubt to the other provincial cities visited on the tour – a combination of an established London theatre lineage, following an apprenticeship with Robertson and Irving, and, evidencing what Mason describes as a ‘close connection’, a sense of familiarity and ownership in the Birmingham audience. Pinero, too, had a history in the theatrical culture shaped by the hegemony of London commercial success, with earlier plays such as The Magistrate (1885) and Dandy Dick (1887) earning him success and a familiar reputation before the writing of The Second Mrs Tanqueray. Alexander and Pinero both seem to have belonged ‘here’ rather than ‘there’ for theatre managers and local audiences, in the terms I have set out above: introduced as part of the touring repertoire of Alexander’s company alongside the other safe and already familiar successes of Liberty Hall, Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Idler, Pinero’s play came as a novelty, but not necessarily as ‘new’ in the disturbing, fin-de-siècle sense. As the review of the performance in the Birmingham Daily Post suggested, by ‘carefully watching the drift of fickle public taste, this skilful dramatist [had] ventured at the right moment to write a play dealing with a subject that not so many years ago would have been regarded as unrepresentable’ (14 September 1893: 5). However, as Mason notes, the play did cause ‘a great deal of discussion in its progress, and at Birmingham especially a newspaper controversy broke out’ (Mason 1935: 63). That controversy was begun by a letter from ‘One in the Gallery’, responding directly to the assertion of the Post’s reviewer that ‘for good or ill, [the play’s] success in Birmingham is beyond dispute’. ‘But at what cost?’, the writer questioned, noting a difference between commercial and moral success and, perhaps anticipating Shaw’s later criticism, wrote that: ‘Failure on its financial aspect may not be written today, and of its power to draw owing to its “spiciness” I do not doubt, but of its moral worth . . . it is a lamentable failure’ (16 September 1893: 5). Much correspondence followed, with ‘La Pucelle’ noting on 20 September that ‘You have inserted six letters from respectability, but they do not speak the truth – which is that these plays occupy the place of the works of the now celebrated Zola’ (5). Alexander himself responded to the ‘extraordinary misconceptions’ of the ‘perversely wrong headed’ ‘[o]ne in the Gallery’ from the next venue on his tour, the Grand Theatre, Leeds (21 September 1893: 4). In their final commentary on the correspondence, the Daily Post suggested that there was little to add to Alexander’s trenchant response. While acknowledging that Pinero’s play was ‘rather strong meat for babes’, the paper concluded that ‘In any case, the success which the piece has achieved is surely a sufficient condonation of any fault which the author has committed in attacking so ticklish a problem’ (22 September 1893: 4). The play’s

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success within the commercial structures of the 1890s theatrical landscape, and its championing by the respectable, successful and locally familiar manager Alexander, meant that the fin-de-siècle whiff of Zola that some identified in The Second Mrs Tanqueray did not prevent its rapid mobility beyond London’s theatres and across a wider geographical landscape.

‘The provincial dog’: Shaw’s Candida Alerting its readers to the Independent Theatre Company tour of 1897, the Morning Post had noted that ‘later on some new plays will be tried, including Mr. Bernard Shaw’s “Candida” ’ (13 July 1897: 5). And indeed the Theatre Royal Nottingham playbill of 13 September 1897 that advertised the ‘Special Engagement of The Independent Theatre Company including Miss Janet Achurch in “A Doll’s House” ’ also announced that on Tuesday 14 September 1897 would be presented an ‘entirely original comedy by George Bernard Shaw, prior to its production in London’. While Shaw, a key figure of the 1890s who had championed Ibsen and the new drama of the fin de siècle, had had his own theatrical success with Arms and the Man in 1894, he failed to persuade either George Alexander or Charles Wyndham, key leading actor-managers, to take Candida on its completion later that same year; the leading Ibsen actor and manager Elizabeth Robins also refused it. Michael Holroyd notes that the fact that it was written specifically for Janet Achurch, with whom Shaw was at that time infatuated, ‘created an extra obstacle for the London actor-managers’ (Holroyd 1988: 319). The play was not performed in London until a Stage Society production in 1902: it was read for copyright purposes in 1895 at South Shields Theatre (Nicoll 1946: 562) but was produced in public performance for the first time by Charrington and the Independent Theatre Company during the Doll’s House tour. Holroyd quotes Shaw as telling the actress Ellen Terry: ‘Charrington is taking out a Doll’s House tour, and he’s going to try “Candida” on the provincial dog’ (380). The play was produced for the first time on 30 July 1897 in Aberdeen, when the ‘compliment’ of the city being ‘chosen for the first representation of an Ibsen drama out of London’, and the production of Shaw’s new comedy ‘for the first time anywhere’, was duly noted. The Aberdeen correspondent of the Dundee Advertiser reported that ‘if the verdict of a keenly watchful and undoubtedly intellectual audience is to affect the future of Mr Shaw’s latest work its success is assured’ (31 July 1897: 5). Elsewhere, however, ‘the provincial dog’ was not particularly impressed. The Dundee Evening Telegraph felt that the play would, we fancy, appeal in an interesting way to but few Dundee playgoers. The intellectual atmosphere necessary for the appreciation of the cynical criticism of things in general, so characteristic of Mr G. B. Shaw, has not yet been developed to any extent in our city. (7 August 1897: 2) Later in the tour the Leamington Spa Courier concluded that ‘we think . . . that the management did well to limit the run of “Candida” to one night, as it is not a production likely to attract much attention’ (21 August 1897: 5). The provincial judgement proved right, and no London run ensued.6

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Conclusion Despite both Mrs Tanqueray and Mrs Ebbsmith being referenced along with Rosmersholm’s Rebecca West in the Birmingham Owl’s humorous essay on the old Magdalen and the new, my exploration of productions in the provincial cities of Birmingham and Nottingham suggests that while the ideas of both Pinero and Ibsen were increasingly familiar to provincial readers as the 1890s progressed, it was only Pinero’s plays that were sufficiently embedded in what Cochrane terms the ‘prevailing metropolitan theatre aesthetic’ to be taken up as part of the usual flows of creative capital from core to periphery, from London to the regions. Occasional successes in London and the enthusiasm of the Ibsenites notwithstanding, the producers of early Ibsen productions were not usually embedded in those dominant structures, meaning that the performance geography of Ibsen’s theatre was, as Newey indicates, largely London-bound. Indeed, the comment of the Era reviewer quoted above that ‘Ibsen in Islington is a risky experiment’ suggests that even within London the geography of interest was a core urban rather than suburban one. This chapter, however, has shown that Ibsen’s ideas – and those of ‘the new woman, the new imperialism, the new realism, the new drama’ – did travel more widely, with newspapers, periodicals, libraries and lectures enabling provincial audiences to encounter the ‘new’ social problem plays that were prompting such enthusiasm and controversy in the capital.

Notes 1. For ease of reference, I term both Birmingham and Nottingham ‘cities’, but it should be noted that while Birmingham was granted city status in 1889, Nottingham did not formally gain city status until the celebration of Queen Victoria’s jubilee in 1897. 2. All references to playbills are to the Library of Birmingham Archives; here see ‘Birmingham Theatre Royal Playbills 1897–99’, MS. 2899/1/3/1/43. 3. See Birmingham Theatre Royal Playbills, MS. 2899/1/3/1/1–65; Prince of Wales Theatre Playbills, MS. 174/1/2/1–25. 4. The Supplementary Catalogue of Books Added for 1881 to 1894 lists mainly poetry under the ‘Poetry and the Drama’ acquisitions. It is not until winter 1906 that the library’s proposal book shows a proposal to purchase any work by George Bernard Shaw, while the plays of Oscar Wilde were ordered for purchase in January 1928. 5. Nottingham was not included in the eight provincial towns that were visited on Alexander’s 1893 tour, as is noted by A. E. W. Mason, Alexander’s first biographer (see Mason 1935). Pinero’s play was first produced there in October 1894 by Mr Fred G. Latham’s touring company, when the correspondent for the Nottingham Evening Post noted that the city had ‘not been favoured with a visit from the original London company’, commenting that Pinero’s play, a ‘triumph . . . for modern British drama’, ‘has come too late to Nottingham for local playgoers to look for any elaborate notice of it’ (16 October 1894: 1). 6. The possibility of using the theatres of the provinces to test out new work was something that Shaw would later return to in his work with the new regional repertory theatres of the early twentieth century.

Works Cited Anderson, B. (2006), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso. Beckett, J. (2006), A Centenary History of Nottingham, Chichester: Phillimore.

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Cochrane, C. (2011), Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, T. C. (1984), Critical and Popular Reaction to Ibsen in England, 1872–1906, PhD thesis, University of Warwick. Ellmann, R. (1988), Oscar Wilde, New York: Vintage. Foxwell, E. and T. C. Farrer (1964), Express Trains, English and Foreign; With Railway Maps of Great Britain and Europe: Being a Statistical Account of All the Express Trains of the World, London: Ian Allen. Harvie, J. (2005), Staging the UK, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Holder, H. J. (2004), ‘The East-End Theatre’, in K. Powell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 257–76. Holroyd, M. (1988), Bernard Shaw. Vol. 1: 1856–1898: The Search for Love, London: Chatto and Windus. James, W. (1909), A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy, London: Longmans, Green. Kaplan, J. (2004), ‘1895: A Critical Year in Perspective’, in J. Donohue (ed.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre. Vol. 2: 1660 to 1895, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 422–39. Kaplan, J. and S. Stowell (1994), Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langton, J. and R. J. Morris (1986), Atlas of Industrializing Britain, 1780–1914, London: Methuen. Laqueur, W. (1996), ‘Fin-de-Siècle: Once More With Feeling’, Journal of Contemporary History, 31: 5–47. Ledger, S. and R. Luckhurst (2000), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880–1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mason, A. E. W. (1935), Sir George Alexander and the St. James’ Theatre, London: Macmillan. Morton, A. L. (1969), The English Utopia, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Newey, K. (2006), ‘Ibsen in the English Theatre’, in M. Luckhurst (ed.), A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama, 1880–2005, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 35–47. Nicoll, A. (1946), A History of Late Nineteenth-Century Drama, 1850–1900, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nordau, M. ([1892, 1895] 1968), Degeneration, New York: H. Fertig. Postlewait, T. (2009), The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rhodes, R. C. (1924), The Theatre Royal, Birmingham, 1774–1924: A Short History, Birmingham: Moody Bros. Salberg, D. (1980), Ring Down the Curtain: A Fascinating Record of Birmingham Theatres and Contemporary Life Through Three Centuries, Luton: Cortney. Shaw, G. B. (1932), Our Theatres in the Nineties. vol. 1, London: Constable. Shaw, G. B. (1901), Three Plays for Puritans, London: Grant Richard. Stokes, J. (2007), ‘Varieties of Performance at the Turn of the Century’, in G. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–22. Stokes, J. (1992), Fin de Siècle/Fin du Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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13 ‘Truth About Russia’: Russia in Britain at the Fin de Siècle Anna Vaninskaya

R

ussia rarely figures in traditional descriptions of the British cultural imaginary at the fin de siècle,1 yet it was in these years that it began to rival established reference points such as France, Germany and Italy as a focus of cultural interest; and the place it came to occupy in both elite and popular discourse was unique. The 1890s were, of course, the heroic age of translation – when the classic works of Russian literature first began to pour from Constance Garnett’s pen – and also the heyday of the Tolstoyan movement, which saw communes inspired by the Russian novelist’s Christian anarchism spring up across Britain. But these phenomena did not appear ex nihilo; they were, on the contrary, the fruits of a long process of cultural gestation. An interest in the major Russian novelists, for instance, long pre-dated the establishment of Garnett’s one-woman translation factory. Ivan Turgenev was probably the best-known contemporary Russian writer from the 1860s onwards; he had been a regular visitor to Britain since the 1840s, and by the time Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1879 he numbered the leading Victorian cultural figures among his acquaintances. Leo Tolstoy was being translated from the 1860s, long before ‘Tolstoyanism’ propelled him to the top of the British spiritual guru charts in the 1880s and 1890s; and English translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky started appearing in the 1880s.2 Of course, a subsection of the educated public had been reading the three novelists in French translation all along, and English translations of Russian poetry and fiction had been trickling steadily via periodicals and book publications since the eighteenth century.3 But in the last two decades of the nineteenth century the process of cultural transmission visibly accelerated; major periodicals such as Cosmopolis and the Athenaeum began to publish overviews of contemporary Russian literature; and Russian intermediaries resident in Britain took an ever more active part in the transmission process. Both Garnett’s translations and the extensive network of Tolstoyans owed their existence to a cohort of revolutionaries, translators, publishers and others who came from the Russian diaspora.4 But most of that diaspora remained outside the pale of British culture. Beginning in the early 1880s, a huge swell of immigration from the Russian Empire altered the face of the East End of London (as well as Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow), and in the process contributed to the growth of xenophobic sentiment that culminated in the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act (see Glover 2012). Just before this Act was passed, the reforming journalist George R. Sims’s lavishly illustrated anthology Living London managed to capture the staggering national and ethnic diversity of the capital city, with chapters encompassing ‘Oriental London’ – ‘Oriental’ included everyone from Armenians to the

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Japanese – the ‘cosmopolitan’ ‘Babel’ of Soho and, of course, ‘Russia in East London’ (Sims 1902–3). The provenance of the latter colony is pathetically described: We have been fortunate to-day, for we have seen the arrival of a ship laden with flesh and blood for the London slave market. The strange, white-faced, holloweyed men and women are Russian and Roumanian Jews. Not a word of English can they speak, but they have come to our crowded city to earn their daily bread. We shall see what happens to them from the time they land with a few shillings in their pockets to the Sunday morning when they stand in the streets to be hired by the sweaters at a wage which makes it a mystery how they can keep body and soul together. (1902–3: I.5) Yet the slaves managed not only to keep body and soul together but to generate ‘nearly a million’ roubles in remittances every year, which, as the book goes on to point out, were sent ‘by the Ghetto Bank of Whitechapel’ to family and friends back home in Russia and Poland (I.27). The Russian section of the anthology offers a representative gallery of cultural stereotypes: icon-worshipping peasants, sweated Jews and the inevitable Nihilist revolutionaries. It takes a peek inside the Russian library in Whitechapel (see Henderson 2013), but it has little to say about the literature that the people behind the stereotypes produced in Yiddish and Russian.5 Indeed, few members of the British public had access to this literature or to the other cultural products of the immigrant community, but they did consume in large quantities literature of a very different sort. In the 1880s and 1890s, love and adventure among the Russian Nihilists had become a popular topic of British stage melodrama and hack fiction, and authors from Oscar Wilde to Arthur Conan Doyle cashed in on the vogue. The fashion had not a little to do with the cultural prominence of real-life Russian revolutionary exiles, some of whom – like Garnett’s collaborator Sergey Stepniak-Kravchinsky – became British celebrities and themselves wrote fiction for the British market. The general fascination with Russia was also fed by influential pro-tsarist press figures like W. T. Stead, and by publications such as the diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, a cosmopolitan painter who died prematurely of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. Bashkirtseff wrote her journal with a view to publication, and its posthumous appearance produced a sensation in the late 1880s. In 1888 interested members of the public could read about it in Oscar Wilde’s society magazine, The Woman’s World, or buy the diary in English translation a few years later from Cassell’s Rainbow Series alongside titles such as King Solomon’s Mines.6 The reception of the diary was merely a straw in the wind. By the 1900s, with the emergence of a vibrant travel literature, professional academic studies and a mounting tide of translations, the golden age of British Russophilia had truly dawned.7 It would be impossible to do justice to every aspect of this phenomenon in the space available, so this chapter will concentrate on just one: the late Victorian obsession with the melodrama of Russian politics, helpfully mythologised as a stand-off between the tsar and the revolutionary Nihilists.

The Perception of Russia: War and Politics But first, it would be useful to cast a brief look at the century as a whole, and ask when it was that Russia featured most prominently on the literary agenda in Britain. The best-known poetic instances all date from before the fin de siècle, and are military in

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nature, revolving specifically around Russia’s wars with the Ottomans. In this canon Lord Byron’s Don Juan (1819–24), with its Catherine the Great and General Suvorov, is closely followed by Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854), with its Crimean War setting; and challenging even the latter in popularity (although of a very different sort) is ‘MacDermott’s War Song’, a music hall staple about the RussoTurkish War that took place nearly a century after the one Byron was writing about: We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too! We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true, The Russians shall not have Constantinople. (Waites and Hunter 1984: 184; see also Cochran 2012) As the Cornhill Magazine said in 1889, ‘threatening Russia [was] a favourite music-hall practice’: ‘you can always make pretty sure of a music-hall audience, either by attacking the vices of the aristocracy or by abusing Russia’ (‘The Music-Hall’, Cornhill Magazine, 60, July–December 1889: 74). But ‘MacDermott’s War Song’, which introduced the word ‘jingo’ into the language in its modern sense, dated from 1878, and if one is listing famous cultural landmarks one now has to jump forward, for it was not until 1901 and Kim that Rudyard Kipling immortalised in fiction the other significant episode in nineteenth-century Anglo-Russian imperial rivalry: the Great Game in central Asia. This superficial checklist does point to an important truth: diplomatic relations and international politics have always been of paramount importance in shaping the literary and cultural interaction between the two countries. And because Russia was most often an enemy, it shared with France and Germany the title of ‘most popular invader’ in the pulp subgenre of invasion fiction that flourished in Britain in the last three decades of the century, as the European arms races heated up (see Hughes and Wood 2014; Wood n.d.; Neilson 1995; 1992). Who exactly took the prize depended on the particular alliance configuration of the day. Louis Tracy’s novel of 1896, The Final War: A Story of the Great Betrayal, featured all three countries as invaders. In The Great War in England in 1897 (1894), the king of international intrigue thriller writers, William Le Queux, introduced a figure that would become the type of the literary foreign spy until after the First World War: a German Jew ‘in the secret pay of the Tsar’ who steals ‘secret treaty plans’ and precipitates an invasion of Britain by France and Russia (Stafford 1981: 497; see also Clarke 1992).8 In Birmingham during the invasion, Babes were murdered before the eyes of their parents, many being impaled by gleaming Russian bayonets . . . The soldiers of the Tsar, savage and inhuman, showed no mercy to the weak and unprotected. They jeered and laughed at piteous appeal, and with fiendish brutality enjoyed the destruction which everywhere they wrought. Many a cold-blooded murder was committed, many a brave Englishman fell beneath the heavy whirling sabres of Circassian Cossacks. (Le Queux 1894: 66–7) The Birmingham setting may have been new, but the imagery had been in circulation for decades.9 It would, of course, be reused to great effect in First World War antiGerman propaganda.

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Like Russian military intentions abroad, Russian political abuses at home loomed large in mainstream discourse. From 1881, when the Jewish pogroms penetrated British consciousness, creative literature followed hot on the heels of the newspaper reports, and contributed in its own fashion to tarnishing the image of the Russian government in Britain. In 1882, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a sonnet, ‘On the Russian Persecution of the Jews’, whose vocabulary – ‘murderous’, ‘treacherous’, ‘tyrant’, ‘slaughterous hands of slaves with feet red-shod / In carnage deep as ever Christian trod’ (1982: 228) – signalled that the godfather of Aestheticism had taken a leaf from the book of the music hall jingoists, with their songs of the Russians’ universal propensity for bloodletting: They slaughtered well at Khiva, in Siberia icy cold, How many subjects done to death will never perhaps be told, They butchered the Circassians, man, woman, yes and child, With cruelties their Generals their murderous hours beguiled. (‘MacDermott’s War Song’, Waites and Hunter 1984: 183) Le Queux could already be seen in the offing. As these examples indicate, one of the central issues of the final decades of the century was the battle over perception: in particular, perception of the Russian state and its internal enemies, those ‘subjects’ sent to their deaths ‘in Siberia icy cold’. The moulding of British popular opinion was too important to leave to the British themselves, however, so in the 1880s it came under a sustained and unprecedented barrage from resident Russian propagandists of the left; propagandists of the right had been at the business since the 1870s. Veritable public relations campaigns were conducted by anarchist and Nihilist political exiles such as Peter Kropotkin and Sergey Stepniak, as well as by pro-tsarist imperialists closely linked to the British political establishment, the most famous of whom in this and subsequent decades was Olga Novikoff, otherwise known as ‘the M.P. for Russia’ (Stead 1909). Their success in capturing the British imagination at this crucial juncture was due both to recent historical developments and to the priming that imagination had received from the press, and from popular literature and drama over the previous few years.

Nihilists on Stage and Page The key historical dates were 1878, 1879 and 1881. In 1878, Vera Zasulich, a member of the populist revolutionary organisation Land and Liberty, shot at the governor of St Petersburg. Her unsuccessful assassination attempt and subsequent trial and acquittal were widely covered in the British press. The following year saw the formation of Narodnaya Volya (‘People’s Will’), a terrorist group dedicated to the assassination of key government figures, and 1881 marked the successful assassination of the reforming tsar Alexander II. The moral panic caused by his death in Britain was considerable, and links were immediately drawn between Russian ‘Nihilism’, as the various revolutionary ideologies were indiscriminately branded, and the home-grown phenomenon of Fenian terrorism, also at its height in the 1880s (see Hughes 2011; Newton 2013). There was no need to follow actual Russian politics to get one’s fill of Nihilists, however; one only had to go to the theatre. As Laurence Senelick (2013) has demonstrated,

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popular farces, burlettas, spectacular melodramas and drawing-room plays had featured Russian themes from the 1810s onwards; the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars in particular furnished much of the subject matter through to the 1860s. But from the 1870s, Nihilists became the new favourite stage cliché, with the indispensable accoutrements of bombs, spies, exile in Siberia, and benevolent or malevolent tsars. Beautiful female revolutionaries stabbing their tormentors or committing suicide instead of assassinating their loved ones were especially in demand. There are echoes of this as late as the 1934 revolutionary espionage film British Agent, based on the memoir of Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat involved in an alleged conspiracy to assassinate Lenin. Lockhart was himself avowedly influenced by the late Victorian Russian-set adventure bestsellers he read in his youth, so it is hardly surprising that when real-life Nihilists like Stepniak stepped onto British shores in the 1880s, they found the Russian revolutionary’s place in the British imagination already secure. According to Michael Hughes (2011), the figure furnished a suitable modern vehicle for older discourses of Russophobia, as well as for a burgeoning Russophilia among those who attributed the flourishing of terrorism to the inflexibility of the tsarist regime and reapportioned the blame accordingly. In the 1880s, revolutionary Nihilists paraded across the stage in a new spate of melodramas, and they rarely appeared without their nemesis, the spy of the tsarist secret police. A favourite twist on this scenario – the double agent – was still being exploited by Joseph Conrad as late as 1907, in the only one of the productions of this ‘generic’ flood to have survived to our day, The Secret Agent. Twenty years previously, the famous actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s portrayal of the head of the Russian secret police in William Outram Tristram’s play The Red Lamp proved a big hit on the London stage, and ‘His catchphrase “I wonder” swept all London’ (Senelick 2013: 29). The play featured a Russian princess, the princess’s brother – a double agent working for the secret police and posing as chief of the Nihilist revolutionaries – and a ‘cache of dynamite’ upon whose discovery the plot hinged. The play proved so popular and was so frequently revived that it served as a point of comparison for Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892 (unsigned review, Black and White, 3, 27 February 1892: 264). The fascination with Nihilists only eased off by the turn of the century when real Russian drama, in particular Tolstoy’s and Gorky’s, began to be adapted for the British stage (Senelick 2013: 31). Popular fiction about Russia followed in a similar groove, spewing up ever new variations on the love story set in the midst of revolutionary activity and Siberian exile, and more often than not featuring a Nihilist female lead, aristocratic for preference. The English translation of Madame Cottin’s 1806 French novel Elizabeth; or, the Exiles of Siberia, which had all the ingredients minus, obviously, the Nihilism, had been reprinted numerous times throughout the century and was still being given out as a Sunday School prize in the 1900s. And a hundred years after Madame Cottin, writers were still to be found reworking the same themes in slightly updated political contexts. John Oxenham’s Hearts in Exile (1904) – quickly turned into a play and then into a film – dealt with exile in Siberia, and even Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children (1906) included a twist on the cliché of the Siberian escapee. Nihilists were clearly deemed a suitable topic for boys and girls. The boy’s own writer G. A. Henty contributed Condemned as a Nihilist: A Story of Escape from Siberia (1892), and Le Queux jumped on the bandwagon with Guilty Bonds (1891) and A Secret Service: Being Strange Tales of a Nihilist (1892). Hesba Stretton, the

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immensely popular Evangelical children’s author and stalwart of the Religious Tract Society, drew, as she said in her preface, from George Kennan’s Siberia and the Exile System (1891) for the ‘details of the protracted journey to Eastern Siberia’ in her book In the Hollow of His Hand (1897), which dealt with tsarist religious rather than political persecution (Stretton 1897: 6).10 For the grown-ups there was E. A. Brayley Hodgetts’s A Russian Wild Flower, or, The Story of A Woman in Search of a Life (1897), which featured the obligatory heroine among revolutionary Nihilists, and L. T. Meade’s The Siren (1898), whose Nihilist female lead was named Vera (an echo, intentional or not, of Oscar Wilde’s first play Vera; or, the Nihilists (1881)). Joseph Hatton’s very successful By Order of the Czar: The Tragic Story of Anna Klosstock, Queen of the Ghetto (1890) was also eventually turned into a play. The 1880s, of course, had been no less crowded. Nihilists, male or female, popped up in Ouida’s Princess Napraxine (1884), Philip May’s Love, The Reward (1885) and Charles Henry Eden’s George Donnington, or, In the Bear’s Grip (1885). All such books were, in their way, but the fictional excrescences on the huge fin-desiècle swell of non-fictional accounts, travelogues and memoirs which took Nihilists, and the inevitable Siberian exile, as their subject.11 And the periodical press, from lowbrow entertainment journals to serious reviews, contributed enormously to the flood. Meri-Jane Rochelson has found hundreds of references to Russian Nihilists in the 1880s and 1890s, ranging from newspaper reports of Nihilist trials and Alexander II’s assassination to half-informative, half-sensationalist articles with titles such as ‘The Evolution of Nihilism’ and ‘What is a Nihilist?’12 A certain Sophie Wassilieff’s six-part ‘Memoirs of a Female Nihilist’, published in Jerome K. Jerome’s The Idler in 1893, broke the trend with its serious, possibly eyewitness account of arrest, imprisonment and exile, but such voices tended to be drowned out by the love and adventure stories of the usual type: Arthur Conan Doyle’s anonymously published ‘A Night Among the Nihilists’, Philip May’s ‘Theodosia’ or the anonymous ‘Nihilism: By One of the Band’, ‘A Nihilist Mandate’ and ‘The Nihilist Plot: A Complete Tale’. All the standard clichés about assassinations, agents, chiefs of the secret police, self-sacrificing female revolutionaries, traitors murdered, former fighters who have seen the error of their ways, tsars and explosives, princesses in love with Nihilists, were to be found in abundance in the pages of the penny fiction weekly The London Journal, in Ludgate Monthly, in London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation or Bow Bells: A Magazine of General Literature and Art for Family Reading. The individual examples listed above appeared in the 1890s, but it was in the 1880s that Nihilism had attained near-mythical status, becoming merely a shorthand for any kind of revolutionary violence or terrorism. In 1885 two Scotsmen, Robert Louis Stevenson and Andrew Lang, in collaboration with Fanny Stevenson and May Kendall respectively, published The Dynamiter and ‘That Very Mab’, books where the figure of the terrorist who blows up his ‘infernal machines’, i.e. bombs, ‘in the interests of hoomanity’ – especially on railway platforms – took centre-stage (Kendall and Lang 1885: 144).13 Stevenson avoided the word, but Lang used ‘Nihilist’ unashamedly, even though his character, like Stevenson’s, was an Irish dynamiter. Irish nationalists were, in fact, often classified as Nihilists by the press, and Russian Nihilism was routinely used as a stand-in for Irish terrorism in fiction and drama of the period (see Newton 2013). ‘Nihilists’ who had absolutely nothing to do with Russia peppered the pages of

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the so-called ‘dynamite novels’ of the 1880s and 1890s. As a character says to the English protagonist of Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886): ‘You have got such a speaking eye. Any one can tell, to look at you, that you have become a Nihilist, that you’re a member of a secret society. You seem to say to every one, “Slow torture won’t induce me to tell where it meets!” ’ (170). And James’s characters think nothing of using ‘Nihilist’ and ‘anarchist’ interchangeably. It was not just in fiction that such confusion reigned. Members of the public, the press and the official classes could rarely tell the difference between the various groups attempting to undermine the establishment. In 1887, T. A. Trollope (Anthony Trollope’s brother) described in his memoir What I Remember his long-ago encounter at a Florentine ‘cosmopolitan gathering’ with an unnamed Russian ‘who had accomplished the rare feat of escaping from Siberia. He was a Nihilist of the most uncompromising type: a huge, shaggy man, with an unkempt head and chest like those of a bear’ (235). The details of the description leave no doubt that Trollope was referring to Mikhail Bakunin, the father of anarchism. In ascribing to him ‘extreme Nihilist theories’, Trollope was using the term in an anachronistic and inaccurate fashion, but by 1887 it was already too well entrenched in popular discourse to give anyone second thoughts (236). Irish Fenian, French anarchist, Russian populist, socialist or nationalist: they were all interchangeable dynamiters who wanted to destroy the foundations of established society, and they were all ‘Nihilists’.

Stepniak and the ‘Intimate Sentiments of Revolutionary Society’ As the overview above reveals, portrayals of this political genus ran the gamut from wild fantasy to scrupulous accuracy, from sympathetic to diabolical. George Gissing’s novel Demos of 1886 took the stereotypical middle ground in referring to the ‘Nihilist, with Siberia or death before him, fighting against a damnable tyranny’ (113). But the decade was framed by two very different depictions of the stock type. Vera; or, The Nihilists, Oscar Wilde’s first failed play of 1881, came from the pen of someone who knew little of the subject, and was in any case more interested in rehearsing the stale tropes of stage melodrama than giving a reliable portrait of Russian revolutionaries. However, in 1889 the publishing house Walter Scott released a semi-autobiographical novel, The Career of a Nihilist, written by the real-life Nihilist terrorist Stepniak, who certainly knew what he was talking about, and who was consciously promulgating a positive counter-stereotype. Like Wilde, he was working in the context of British perceptions. Kendall and Lang’s ‘That Very Mab’ had included a chapter entitled ‘The Subsequent Career of the Nihilist’, and it is not too outrageous to assume that this gave Stepniak the idea for his title, especially when one recalls Lang’s parody of the progressive attitude to Nihilism in that book: He is the natural product of the present depraved state of Society and of the Legislature . . . and therefore to be pitied rather than condemned. He should be accepted as a warning, a merciful token sent to all thrones, principalities and powers, reminding them of the error of their ways. (Kendall and Lang 1885: 145) It was precisely to encourage real sympathy in the public that Stepniak published his own Career of a Nihilist.

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Stepniak was a People’s Will theorist and militant, who murdered the Russian head of the secret police N. V. Mezentsov and fled to Britain for asylum in 1884. Once there, he launched an intensive publishing programme to influence public opinion, explaining and justifying the Russian revolutionary movement by reference to tsarist oppression. Some of his articles and the book Underground Russia (1882) – a glorification of the Nihilist cause and the hero-martyrs who served it – had actually appeared in English translation even before he came to the country. His writings deconstructed the negative stereotype of the Nihilist propagated in some (though by no means all) popular fiction and drama, and created a counter-image in its stead. He was aided in his mission by the fact that numerous British-authored texts, not to mention press accounts, already took the sympathetic point of view (see Rochelson 2012; Melchiori 1985; Hughes 2011). Stepniak’s condemnations of the tsarist regime were read far outside the small circles of anarchists and socialists, and received a sympathetic hearing in the most unexpected organs. A puff in the Athenaeum for the ‘second and cheaper edition’ of The Career of a Nihilist recommended the book to its readers precisely as an antidote to the inaccurate native article: One expects a Nihilist romance by Stepniak to be full of the actualities of the situation, to display the genuine and intimate sentiments of revolutionary society in Russia, and to correct not a few of the impressions formerly gathered from novelists who only know that society by hearsay and at second-hand. The reader will not be disappointed in this expectation. No one can read this story . . . without deep interest. (Athenaeum, 30 November 1889: 779) This was an ‘establishment’ paper doing a Russian terrorist’s job for him. Surprising numbers of reviewers, from The Times downwards, praised and accepted Stepniak’s portrayals of Russia. The ‘Nihilist romance’ promoting regicide was warmly received, though it portrayed exactly the kind of outrage that popular opinion was on many other occasions only too quick to condemn. Although conservative die-hards in organs such as the Saturday Review continued to shake their heads and draw parallels between Russian and Irish terrorism, many others agreed that the Russians ‘had right at least partly on their side’ (Hughes 2011: 269; see also Rochelson 2012). They were not fighting a liberal democracy, like the Fenians, but a despotic regime – a regime, furthermore, that was challenging British imperial interests in Asia. It is no wonder that in the 1880s and 1890s Nihilist melodramas on stage and page, by authors hardly known for their radical credentials, began to feature the conspirators as heroes. In E. Phillips Oppenheim’s The Mysterious Mr Sabin of 1898 the machinations of a French-German spy who steals ‘a detailed survey of Britain’s coastal defences’ are foiled by an international secret society that has a soft spot for Britain precisely because it ‘grants asylum to Nihilists’ (Trotter 1991: 43). In such narratives the English protagonist, if present at all, is sometimes sympathetic to the Nihilist cause, even to the extent of joining a clandestine organisation. George Griffith’s surprisingly long-lived amalgam of Nihilist melodrama, future war narrative and science fiction, The Angel of the Revolution (1893), fits the pattern perfectly. The back cover of the 2012 edition describes it as a fantastical tale of air warfare in which an intrepid group of Socialists, Anarchists and Nihilists defeats Capitalism with their superior knowledge of dirigibles. Led by

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a crippled, brilliant Russian Jew and his daughter, Natasha, The Brotherhood of Freedom establishes a ‘pax aeronautica’ over the world, thanks to the expertise of Richard Arnold, a young scientist. Arnold falls in love with Natasha (the eponymous Angel), and Griffith builds a utopian vision of Socialism and romance. (Griffith 2012) The young Englishman in league with the foreign Nihilist was clearly an appealing combination. In Oscar Wilde’s comic story Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1887), the title character visits his friend Count Rouvaloff, a Russian ‘Nihilist agent’ in Bloomsbury, to get the address of a bomb-maker. ‘Scotland Yard would give a good deal to know this address, my dear fellow’, says Wilde’s Nihilist. ‘“They shan’t have it,” cried Lord Arthur, laughing; and after shaking the young Russian warmly by the hand he ran downstairs’ (Wilde 1998: 42). Lord Arthur is in the blowing-up business on his own account, and his attempt fails comically, but protagonists, whether Russian or English, who committed to carrying out an assassination on behalf of a secret society and then had an earnest change of heart were the stock-in-trade of the genre. Their mental deliberations and emotional turmoil were given respectful attention, and the authors made it possible to empathise with the perspective of the aggrieved hero or heroine. As the London Journal put it in 1896, [t]he popular idea of a Nihilist is that he is a ferocious ruffian, ready for rapine and thirsty for blood, hating restraint, and loathing the law[, i]t would astonish multitudes to learn that ‘he’ is often a woman, and a woman of a very noble order of mind and spirit, too. (‘What is a Nihilist?’, London Journal, 21 August 1896: 166; quoted in Rochelson 2012) International terrorists were a threat, but in the Russian context they could also be seen as freedom fighters, and their equivocal nature accounted for many of the sympathetic notes in the fiction of the 1880s and 1890s, and for the Nihilist novel’s and drama’s occasional willingness to step into the shoes of the enemy. Though no data exists on the total number of positive and negative portrayals to prove which way the popular wind really blew, there is no doubt that the success of Stepniak’s PR campaign was due to an already existing conviction among an important minority of Britons that the use of political violence was justified in the context of autocracy. Stepniak’s was not the only ‘real’ Russian voice to be raised on the issue. The aristocratic Madame Novikoff – Slavophile propagandist of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationalism’ (in her own words)14 and closely linked with Gladstone, Carlyle and Froude – launched a pro-tsarist counterattack in the Pall Mall Gazette, edited by her admirer W. T. Stead. But Stepniak won this and many other rounds, and by the 1890s, having obtained his own reserve of literary and political contacts in high society, he went unchallenged as the premier respectable spokesman for the Russian revolutionary cause (see Hughes 2011). So respectable was he, in fact, that in 1893 Chums, a middle-class boy’s story paper, printed ‘A Chat with Stepniak, the Russian Nihilist’, in which the interviewer assured his juvenile readers ‘that persons who can plan revolutions are often – for that matter, like pirate captains and highwaymen – personally very amiable’. He concluded that it was ‘an awful shame’ that Russian boys were exiled to Siberia by the tsar in order ‘to nip Nihilism in the bud’, and ‘assured [Stepniak] that “Chums” readers would be heart and soul with me in this sentiment’ (Banfield

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1893: 169). In the adult world, the foundation in 1890 of the Society of the Friends of Russian Freedom was another significant milestone on the way to Nihilist rehabilitation, not to say domestication. But it was in the 1880s that Stepniak made a name for himself, even among those who could not be expected to approve of anti-tsarist propaganda. The use W. T. Stead – no friend of the Nihilists – made of Stepniak’s work in his 1888 travelogue and political commentary Truth About Russia bears out this cross-party appeal. He quoted Stepniak liberally – as the enemy whose confirmation is worth more than a friend’s – and it pays to examine his book in more detail.

W. T. Stead and ‘Truth’ about Tsarist Russia Stead is best-known today as the author of ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ – an exposé about underage sex slavery in London – as well as a pioneering tabloid journalist (and editor of the Review of Reviews), and a Spiritualist who died on the Titanic. He was also, however, a real, though certainly not unbiased, Russia expert. His association with the country contributed to his notoriety both at home and in Russia itself, especially given his relatively unusual (for progressive public opinion, that is) tendency to side with the autocratic regime and with the people who represented its reactionary opinions in Britain. His visits to Russia and hero-worshipping interviews with the tsars found their mirror image several decades later in his acquaintance H. G. Wells’s interviews with the Soviet dictators.15 As Janet Ashton (2004) has shown, Stead’s interest in the occult and activities as a peace campaigner were all driven by his fascination with Russia; but the fascination was not always reciprocated by his Russian counterparts in London, where the Russian émigré press accorded a very negative reception to Stead and his brand of journalism. Stead had ‘established himself as a “Gladstonian” Russophile during the second half of the 1870s’ (Hughes 2011: 259). His association with Russia dated from his time as a ‘shipping clerk’ in Darlington, when he had been employed by the ‘Russian Vice Consul, and introduced . . . to members of the Russian community [in the city] . . . as well as to crews from Russian ships’ (Ashton 2004). A series of pro-Russian articles he published in the Darlington Echo brought him to the attention of Madame Novikoff, who became a lifelong friend and platonic love interest, and who – quite importantly for Stead’s development, and as Stead himself later wrote – had ‘always been in more or less sharp antagonism to the revolutionary party and to the revolutionary exiles in London’ (Stead 1909: I.22). It was Madame Novikoff who, again according to Stead, suggested to tsar Alexander III in 1885 that he should subscribe to the Pall Mall Gazette, of which Stead was then editor. And in 1888 Stead travelled to St Petersburg to interview the tsar – an absolutely unprecedented thing to do. As he described it himself in his diary: When I went to Russia in the early summer of this year I went to do certain things. . . . Never since I was in gaol had I two months of such exalted enjoyment . . . For years I had been abused and misunderstood and ridiculed for my firm faith in the Russians. It was the one point on which I stood most alone. The result was that I was afforded opportunities no one else had, first, of ascertaining the truth about Russian policy and, secondly, in obtaining a vantage ground in the confidence of the Tsar from which I could speak in favour of peace, liberty,

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justice and reform. . . . I saw the Emperor and most of his Ministers. I stayed with Tolstoy. . . . I wrote my articles as I had never written anything since ‘The Maiden Tribute’. I achieved a greater personal success in higher spheres than ever before. . . . My great ideal of journalism seemed to come nearer realisation. (W. T. Stead diary entry for 25 September 1888; quote in Scott 1952: 147–8) When he returned he found that the Pall Mall Gazette had mangled the publication of his letters, and his indignant reaction nearly cost him the editorship. This was, however, the beginning of Stead’s personal infatuation with the Russian tsars. He was already being accused of acting as the tsar’s ‘mouthpiece’, and now he got the ultimate journalistic scoop: no other newspaperman had ever persuaded the tsar to talk. According to Ashton, ‘Stead was thrilled with the whole experience’, thought he had ‘thawed the Tsar’s attitude to Britain’, and went on to offer a gushing portrait of Alexander ‘as a giant of moral and diplomatic courage’ in the book of impressions he published after his return. Stead remained staunchly pro-Russian (which is to say pro-government) ‘during subsequent anti-Russian outbreaks in British public opinion’, and in later years he went on to interview Nicholas II, and to receive a drubbing in the Russian émigré press for his blind adulation of that monarch. With regard to Alexander III, however, he kept his head to some extent, though only thanks to his Nonconformist sympathies. The pea under the mattress was the tsar’s treatment of Evangelicals, both British and Russian, who were thrown into prison in the same manner as the Nihilists. ‘As I heard the story of the Hiltons – my own countrymen and co-religionists’, Stead wrote in Truth About Russia, ‘my scepticism as to the complaints of the Nihilists was gradually undermined’ (Stead 1888: 353, see also 366). But this is virtually the only instance when the Nihilist viewpoint is given a sympathetic hearing; Stead’s usual attitude in the book is encapsulated in the following passage, worthy of the most melodramatic popular novel: The Nihilists, in pursuance of the campaign of terrorism which culminated in the murder of the Emperor, had succeeded in destroying the nerves of the Russian Ministers. With a diabolical ingenuity they seized all the scanty means available for the dissemination of literature for the propagation of their doctrines. New Testaments were scattered far and wide in which only the first few pages bore the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and all the rest was the Gospel according to Dynamite! . . . Nihilism and the Nihilist propaganda seemed to confront the Administration at every turn. In a fever a patient will strike at the doctor or the nurse. Russia, delirious with the suppressed fever of Nihilism, could hardly be blamed if she struck wildly at any and every person whose shadow irritated her shattered nerves. (359–60) And so it turns out that the government is not entirely to blame for its religious persecutions: they are just an understandable overreaction to the threat of Nihilism.That the threat is real and deadly is rubbed in at every available opportunity, in the regular references to ‘the shattered body of the murdered Emperor’ (318) and the manly persona of his successor, Alexander III, for whom ‘Nihilist plots and foreign intrigues . . . [are] all in the day’s work’ (125).

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When last year the Nihilist attempt of March 13 came within a hair’s breadth of success, the Emperor displayed the most absolute self-command. . . . the Empress . . . poor thing, of less iron nerve than her husband, broke down utterly and wept. . . . Not so her husband. ‘I am ready,’ he said simply; ‘I will do my duty at any cost.’ The Emperor does not seem bowed down or crushed beneath the Imperial load, the full weight of which neither he nor any one can adequately realise. He stands erect and joyous; cheerful, without bravado. (124) Just how influential and long-lasting this kind of rhetoric proved to be among conservative observers of Russia can be seen, unsurprisingly, in fiction. As late as 1913, Le Queux was still channelling Stead and his ilk in the potboiler The Price of Power: Being Chapters from the Secret History of the Imperial Court of Russia. At the novel’s opening, the English protagonist speaks with a Russian officer of ‘this abominable wave of anarchism which has spread over Europe, it behoves the secret police to take every precaution for His Majesty’s safety!’ (4). But, replies the officer, ‘The [Russian] Emperor has nerves of iron. He is the least concerned of any of us’ . . . ‘What – more conspiracies’ I exclaimed. ‘Conspiracies!’ sighed the Captain. ‘Mon Dieu! A fresh one is discovered every week . . . And yet [the Tsar] preserves an outward calm that is truly remarkable.’ (5) An absurdist catalogue of ‘desperate plot[s]’ follows, in which conspirators, including ‘girl-students’, attempt to assassinate the Emperor with bombs, as well as – with rather more success – ‘two Prime Ministers’, ‘five governors of provinces’, and ‘eight chiefs of police’ (6–8). Was it any wonder, then, that the Emperor lived in bomb-proof rooms . . . that he never slept in the same bed twice . . . that he never gave audience without a loaded revolver lying upon the table before him, and that he surrounded himself by hordes of police-agents and spies? Surely none could envy him such a life of constant apprehension and daily terror; for twice in a month had bombs been thrown at his carriage, while five weeks before he had had both horses killed by an explosion in Moscow and only escaped death by a sheer miracle . . . Any other but a man of iron constitution and nerves of steel would surely have been driven to lunacy by the constant terror in which he was forced to exist. Yet, though he took ample precaution, he never betrayed the slightest anxiety . . . He was a true Russian, an autocrat of dogged courage . . . a faithful friend, but a bitter and revengeful enemy; a born ruler and a manly Emperor in every sense of the word. (8) Stead was not quite as bloodthirsty as Le Queux. He wanted to argue not only that the tsar and his ministers were partially justified in their actions, but that they were also humane and merciful to their enemies – more so, he was at pains to show, than their British counterparts. Stead drew constant parallels between Russia and Ireland – not in order to exonerate the Russian revolutionary cause by contrast with the Fenian, as many other commentators did – but in order to demonstrate how much more abominably the British government treated the Irish than the Russian authorities did the

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Nihilists. He professes not to believe Nihilist stories about the horrors of the Russian prison system (Stead 1888: 232–3, 245): the British, he claims, is patently worse.16 Just a couple of years later, the American George Kennan, motivated by the same disbelief in the accounts of Stepniak and Kropotkin, travelled to Siberia to see the prison conditions the Nihilists experienced for himself. The result was the sympathetic and outraged Siberia and the Exile System, which proved influential for subsequent British writers (see Hesba Stretton above). But Stead had no intention of investigating the Siberian prison system first-hand, and he was convinced in any case that the revolutionaries had no one but themselves to blame: ‘Of all the trophies of the Nihilist camorra that of which they have most reason to be proud is the persecuting policy of M. Pobedonestzeff – a policy the popular excuse for which is the terror they have inspired’,17 ‘the terrible force of the Nihilist explosive’ (Stead 1888: 318). Stead interviewed not only the tsar, but various officials who were responsible for ‘the persecuting policy’. He asked one about the progress of his campaign against the Nihilists. . . . He had all their leaders, he said, in exile or under lock and key. The rank and file were very quiet, but it would be a mistake to regard the conspiracy as extinct. It was spreading underground among students and workmen. There was absolutely no trace of it among the peasants . . . I asked him whether he shared in the popular view as to the close connection between the Jews and the Nihilists. He said that he had the best reasons for knowing that the Nihilist disorders in the University were all the work of the Jewish students. (247) As Ashton (2004) maintains, ‘some of Stead’s later writings . . . hint at his belief in the myth that all Russian revolutionaries were Jewish’, a belief that the Russian reactionaries whose views he promulgated held as a matter of course, but which also found an embodiment in a number of the popular British plays and novels examined above, as well as in mainstream British press opinion from 1880 onwards (see Rochelson 2012). The other point made by the ‘persecuting’ official about Nihilism making no headway among the peasants also deserves some scrutiny. This is not only an accurate indication of the historical failure of the Russian populist movements of the period, but a clue to Stead’s alternative vision of Russia as a land of peaceful peasant communities under the benevolent tutelage of the tsar – a vision into whose service he would successfully press the hated Nihilists themselves: No Russian, not even the bitterest Nihilist, ignores the popular conception of the Tzar as the good shepherd. Of this a very remarkable illustration is afforded in the last chapter of Stepniak’s latest book, ‘The Russian Peasantry.’ It is an offence to many Russians even to name ‘Stepniak,’ who they say is a well-known murderer; but that fact makes his testimony as to this aspect of the question all the more valuable. . . . No one can for a moment accuse ‘Stepniak’ of partiality to the Tzardom. No more prejudiced witness could be brought forward to certify to facts the existence of which no one deplores more bitterly than he. We may therefore accept as beyond dispute the reality of the peasant’s faith in his Imperial Shepherd. (Stead 1888: 194–5)

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Stepniak came in very useful whenever Stead needed to throw a glow of authenticity over his defence of the Russian mir or peasant village community, which he called ‘the most democratic and socialistic of any institution now existing in all Europe’. In thus describing the Russian village republic, I am aware that I shall be accused by those whose one idea of Russia is despotism, of allowing myself to be biassed [sic] by sympathy with the autocratic system under which such decentralisation is possible. I may, therefore, quote, for the confounding of this class of critic, the following passage from ‘Stepniak’ . . . an avowed Nihilist, [who] cannot be accused of sympathy with the autocracy. But he is a Russian, and knows the Mir. (177) This latter aside is found in Stead’s account of his visit to Leo Tolstoy’s estate Yasnaya Polyana, which he views as a modern incarnation of the Anglo-Saxon folkmote (though, given the proscription of tobacco and alcohol, one with obvious Evangelical overtones). Two very different discourses of Russia, both typical of the 1880s, are here curiously superimposed upon one another. The dark and violent ‘Nihilist terror’ (321–2), whose misguided and counterproductive assassination plots are an obsessive motif of Stead’s book, comes face to face with the cult of Tolstoy the modern Christ, and his gospel of peace and communalism, helpfully assimilated to the tropes of English historiography. Stead dedicates a large chunk of the book to Tolstoy and Tolstoyanism, a subject of much fascination in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s, which was coming to rival Nihilism as a popular prism through which to view Russian culture. In the 1900s, of course, Russia the land of the soulful, traditional peasant would find its apotheosis in the travel writing of Stephen Graham. But Stead brings the two paradigms together for a showdown: As a prophylactic to Nihilism the [Tolstoyan] propaganda is said to have proved very useful. It affords an outlet for the spirit of divine discontent, which was infinitely nobler than that offered by the party of dynamite – nobler, and at the same time deeper. The number of those who embraced the new doctrine in its entirety, who gave up all that they had and lived by faith, working with their hands, and living and dressing and labouring like the peasants, was not great; but among those who had abandoned all, the new spirit had borne notable fruits in the shape of heroic self-abnegation, and a passionate philanthropy which was sometimes sublime. (407) In fact, ‘Count Tolstoi’ himself had written to ‘the Emperor on his accession, reminding him of Christ’s words, and calling for the pardon of the Nihilists who assassinated his father’ (443). Elsewhere in the book, even without the virtuous influence of Tolstoyanism, Stead perceives the dawning possibility of redemption: Even in the inner circle of the Nihilist conspiracy, signs are not wanting that the long-looked-for change is at hand. The very remarkable confession of M. Tikhomiroff – one of the ablest of the Revolutionaries, who, after devoting years of his life to the service of the Revolution, has now abandoned Nihilism, and prays only for forgiveness from the Emperor whose Government he had so

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determinedly opposed – indicates that the period of despair is drawing to a close: that hope is beginning to shed its beneficent rays upon the darkest hearts. The generous response which Madame Novikoff has publicly made to M. Tikhomiroff is a not less gratifying indication of the approach of an era of reconciliation and of peace. (203) Fortunately for the careers of many British hack writers, the era of peace never did arrive, and they could go on churning out hair-raising stories of conspiracy and intrigue well into the 1890s and beyond. For Stead, bringing that era closer became the primary task of the following decades, when reconciliation not just between the tsar and his internal enemies (especially after the revolution of 1905), but between Russia and the other Great Powers, emerged as perhaps the greatest of his numerous projects. What his book showed, however, was that whichever side observers of Russia took, whichever ‘truth about’ it they attempted to tell, the figure of the Nihilist unavoidably cast its shadow over the telling. And of the many rival images of Russia in the nineteenth century, the one defined during the fin de siècle by the romanticised contradictions of political Nihilism proved to be among the most durable and influential.

Notes 1. There is now a large secondary literature dealing with various aspects of the Russian ‘presence’ in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A selection of key English-language works (not including individual articles) published in the current decade includes Beasley and Bullock (2013; 2011); Cross (2014; 2012b); MacLean (2014); and for individual figures, Wrenn and Soboleva (2012); Diment (2011); Alston (2013a; 2013b); and Henderson (2017). There is also a large literature on this subject in Russian. 2. See Waddington (1980) and Simmons (1967). There is an extensive literature on the reception and translation of Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Victorian Britain; for an indicative bibliography that includes Gilbert Phelps, Helen Muchnik, Royal A. Gettmann, Dorothy Brewster, Anthony Cross, Patrick Waddington, W. J. Leatherbarrow, W. Gareth Jones, Glyn Turton and Peter Kaye, see Beasley and Bullock (2013: 1–2). 3. See Cross (2012a; 1985) and his numerous other publications; on translation specifically see May (1994), Fitzpatrick (2007) and the earlier sources they draw on. 4. For one of the best studies of the link between the Russian immigration and the explosion of translations of Russian literature at the fin de siècle, see Peaker (2006). 5. This literature has still not been the subject of a major study, although the historiography of the Jewish community in the East End is large, and the Yiddish-language press has received attention in Anglo-Jewish scholarship, especially in the contexts of socialism and Zionism. Fishman (1975) is a seminal text; more recent scholarship includes Lachs (2014a; 2014b). 6. Cassell was also the publisher of The Woman’s World and W. T. Stead’s Truth About Russia. On the Bashkirtseff phenomenon, see Delafield (2015). It may be Bashkirtseff that Wilde had in mind when he gave Cecily the following lines about her diary in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy’ (Wilde 2008: 282). It bears emphasising here that Wilde’s interest in Russia was multifaceted – he also reviewed Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – and that he was by no means the only Decadent writer to look towards Russia at this time. Arthur Symons and Havelock Ellis not only wrote about the literature of Russia, especially Tolstoy, but even travelled there.

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7. See Hughes (2014a; 2014b; 2000), as well as Beasley (2013) and Beasley and Bullock (2011). 8. For a consideration of some examples of invasion fiction and nihilist romance mentioned in this chapter from a different angle – as precursors of the twentieth-century spy novel – see Vaninskaya (2016). 9. For examples of identical Cossack behaviour on the stage in the 1820s, see Senelick (2013). 10. This book, too, was given out as a Sunday School prize in the 1900s. 11. For an analysis of many of these texts see Melchiori (1985); see also Young (n.d.; 2014a; 2010). 12. For most of the details in this paragraph I am indebted to Rochelson (2012). 13. There is a large secondary literature on terrorism in late Victorian and Edwardian fiction. See Glazzard (2016), which places Conrad in this context; Wisnicki (2008); O Donghaile (2011); and Frank and Gruber (2012). 14. As reported by Tuckwell (1902: 93); chapter 5 of the book is devoted to ‘Madame Novikoff’. 15. On Stead and Wells, see Baylen (1974). 16. This was apparently something of a trope among other travellers in the 1880s and 1890s – some of them followers of Madame Novikoff – who published very positive accounts of the Siberian prison system in their Russian travelogues; see Young (2013; 2014b). 17. The reference is to Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the most influential statesman of Alexander III’s reign.

Works Cited Alston, C. (2013a), Tolstoy and His Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement, London: IB Tauris. Alston, C. (2013b), ‘Britain and the International Tolstoyan Movement, 1890–1910’, in R. Beasley and P. R. Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 53–70. Ashton, J. (2004), ‘“Russia owes a great deal to Mr. Stead”: Tsarism’s Unlikely Champion and the International Press’, Atlantis Magazine, 5. 2, http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/ worksabout/ashton.php Banfield, F. (1893), ‘Russian Boys and Their Games: A Chat with Stepniak, the Russian Nihilist’, Chums, 8 November: 169. Baylen, J. O. (1974), ‘W. T. Stead and the Early Career of H. G. Wells, 1895–1911’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 38. 1: 53–79. Beasley, R. (2013), ‘Reading Russian: Russian Studies and the Literary Canon’, in R. Beasley and P. R. Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 162–87. Beasley, R. and P. R. Bullock (eds) (2013), Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beasley, R. and P. R. Bullock (eds) (2011), ‘Translating Russia, 1890–1935’, special issue of Translation and Literature, 20. 3. Clarke, I. F. (1992), Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763–3749, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cochran, P. (2012), ‘Byron, Don Juan, and Russia’, in A. Cross (ed.), A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, Cambridge: Open Book, pp. 37–52. Cross, A. (ed.) (2014), In the Land of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-Hand English-Language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613–1917), Cambridge: Open Book. Cross, A. (2012a), ‘William Henry Leeds and Early British Responses to Russian Literature’, in A. Cross (ed.), A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, Cambridge: Open Book, pp. 53–68.

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Cross, A. (ed.) (2012b), A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, Cambridge: Open Book. Cross, A. (1985), The Russian Theme in English Literature from the Sixteenth Century to 1980: An Introductory Survey and a Bibliography, Oxford: W. A. Meeuws. Delafield, C. (2015), ‘“Telling all”: Reading Women’s Diaries in the 1890s’, in M. Bradley and J. John (eds), Reading and the Victorians, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 79–88. Diment, G. (2011), A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Fishman, W. J. (1975), East End Jewish Radicals 1875–1914, London: Duckworth. Fitzpatrick, J. (2007), Russia Englished: Theorizing Translation in the 20th Century, PhD thesis, Duke University. Frank, M. C. and E. Gruber (eds) (2012), Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Gissing, G. (1886), Demos: A Story of English Socialism, vol. 3, London: Smith, Elder. Glazzard, A. (2016), Conrad’s Popular Fictions: Secret Histories and Sensational Novels, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Glover, D. (2012), Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin de Siècle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Griffith, G. C. (2012), The Angel of the Revolution, ed. S. McLean, Brighton: Victorian Secrets. Henderson, R. (2017), Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia: A Revolutionary in the Time of Tsarism and Bolshevism, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Henderson, R. (2013), ‘“For the cause of education”: A History of the Free Russian Library in Whitechapel, 1898–1917’, in R. Beasley and P. R. Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 71–86. Hughes, M. (2014a), Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham, Cambridge: Open Book. Hughes, M. (2014b), ‘Every Picture Tells Some Stories: Photographic Illustrations in British Travel Accounts of Russia on the Eve of World War One’, Slavonic and East European Review, 92. 4: 674–703. Hughes, M. (2011), ‘British Opinion and Russian Terrorism in the 1880s’, European History Quarterly, 41. 2: 255–77. Hughes, M. (2000), ‘Bernard Pares, Russian Studies and the Promotion of Anglo-Russian Friendship, 1907–14’, Slavonic and East European Review, 78. 3: 510–35. Hughes, M. and H. Wood (2014), ‘Crimson Nightmares: Tales of Invasion and Fears of Revolution in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Contemporary British History, 28. 3: 294–317. James, H. (1886), The Princess Casamassima: A Novel, vol. 1, London: Macmillan. Kendall, M. and A. Lang (1885), ‘That Very Mab’, London: Longmans, Green. Lachs, V. (2014a), ‘The Yiddish Veker in London. Morris Winchevsky: Building a Broad Left through Poetry 1884–1894’, Socialist History Journal, 45: 1–24. Lachs, V. (2014b), ‘Revolution in Anglo-Yiddish Poetry: Morris Winchevsky’s Strategies to Revolutionise the Jewish Immigrants to Britain 1884–1894’, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, 14. 1: 1–19. Le Queux, W. (1913), The Price of Power: Being Chapters from the Secret History of the Imperial Court of Russia, London: Hurst and Blackett. Le Queux, W. (1894), The Great War in England in 1897, London: Tower. MacLean, C. (2014), The Vogue for Russia: Mysticism and Modernism in Britain, 1900–1930, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. May, R. (1994), The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Melchiori, B. (1985), Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel, London: Croom Helm.

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Neilson, K. (1995), Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–1917, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neilson, K. (1992), ‘Tsars and Commissars: W. Somerset Maugham, “Ashenden” and Images of Russia in British Adventure Fiction, 1890–1930’, Canadian Journal of History, 27. 3: 475–500. Newton, M. (2013), ‘“Nihilists of Castlebar!”: Exporting Russian Nihilism in the 1880s and the case of Oscar Wilde’s Vera; or the Nihilists’, in R. Beasley and P. R. Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 35–52. O Donghaile, D. (2011), Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Peaker, C. L. (2006), Reading Revolution: Russian Émigrés and the Reception of Russian Literature in England, c. 1890–1905, PhD thesis, University of Oxford. Rochelson, M.-J. (2012), ‘Networking Nihilists: Russian Nihilists in the British Periodical Press, 1880–1900’, presented at the annual meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association, Madison, WI, September. Scott, J. W. R. (1952), The Life and Death of a Newspaper, London: Methuen. Senelick, L. (2013), ‘“For God, for Czar, for Fatherland”: Russians on the British Stage from Napoleon to the Great War’, in R. Beasley and P. R. Bullock (eds), Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–34. Simmons, J. S. G. (1967), ‘Turgenev and Oxford’, Oxoniensia, 31: 146–52. Sims, G. R. (ed.) (1902–3), Living London: Its Work and Its Play, Its Humour and Its Pathos, Its Sights and Its Scenes, 3 vols, London: Cassell. Stafford, D. A. T. (1981), ‘Spies and Gentlemen: The Birth of the British Spy Novel, 1893–1914’, Victorian Studies, 24. 4: 489–509. Stead, W. T. (1909), The M.P. for Russia: Reminiscences and Correspondence of Madame Olga Novikoff, 2 vols, London: Andrew Melrose. Stead, W. T. (1888), Truth About Russia, London: Cassell. Stretton, H. (1897), In the Hollow of His Hand, London: Religious Tract Society. Swinburne, A. C. (1982), ‘On the Russian Persecution of the Jews’, in A. C. Swinburne, Selected Poems, ed. L. M. Findlay, Manchester: Carcanet, p. 228. Trollope, T. A. (1887), What I Remember, vol. 2, London: Richard Bentley and Son. Trotter, D. (1991), ‘The Politics of Adventure in the Early British Spy Novel’, in W. K. Wark (ed.), Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence, New York: Routledge, pp. 30–54. Tuckwell, W. (1902), A. W. Kinglake: A Biographical and Literary Study, London: George Bell and Sons. Vaninskaya, A. (2016), ‘Russian Nihilists and the Prehistory of Spy Fiction”, in D. F. Felluga (ed.), BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=anna-vaninskayarussian-nihilists-and-the-prehistory-of-spy-fiction Waddington, P. (1980), Turgenev and England, London: Macmillan. Waites, A. and R. Hunter (1984), The Illustrated Victorian Songbook, London: Michael Joseph. Wilde, O. (2008), The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. P. Raby, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilde, O. (1998), Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. I. Murray, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wisnicki, A. S. (2008), Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel, New York: Routledge. Wood, H. (n.d), ‘Island Mentalities’, https://invasionscares.wordpress.com/ Wrenn, A. and O. Soboleva (2012), The Only Hope of the World: George Bernard Shaw and Russia, Oxford: Peter Lang.

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Young, S. J. (n.d.), ‘Siberia and the Pre-Revolutionary Russian Penal System’ https://www.flickr.com/ photos/89303702@N03/albums/72157646342413765/page1 Young, S. J. (2014a), ‘Katorga and Exile Illustrated’, http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2014/08/13/ katorga-and-exile-illustrated/ Young, S. J. (2014b), ‘No Worse than English Prisons’, http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2014/04/16/ no-worse-than-english-prisons/ Young, S. J. (2013), ‘Knowing Russia’s Convicts: The Other in Narratives of Imprisonment and Exile of the Late Imperial Era’, Europe-Asia Studies, 65. 9: 1700–15. Young, S. J. (2010), ‘Siberian Narratives on archive.org and Google Books’, http://sarahjyoung.com/ site/2010/07/29/siberian-narratives-on-archive-org-and-google-books/

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14 Aestheticism in Italy: A New Sense of Place Stefano Evangelista

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n 1883 Henry James sent John Addington Symonds a copy of the Century magazine with his illustrated essay on Venice. One year later, James wrote again to explain the reasons for his gift: I sent it to you because it was a constructive way of expressing the good will I felt for you in consequence of what you have written about the land of Italy – and of intimating to you, somewhat dumbly, that I am an attentive and sympathetic reader. I nourish for the said Italy an unspeakably tender passion, and your pages always seemed to say to me that you were one of a small number of people who love it as much as I do – in addition to your knowing it immeasurably better. I wanted to recognize this (to your knowledge;) for it seemed to me that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look. (Lubbock 1920: I.106–7) James’s words encapsulate Italy’s significance for English aesthetic writers of the fin de siècle. The aesthetes were a cosmopolitan crowd – the American James was writing from Paris to the Switzerland-based English Symonds; yet Italy always occupied a special place in their imagination and cultural geography. Italy was the country to know best and to love best. It was, in James’s words, the object of ‘an unspeakably tender passion’, which was also, importantly, a ‘common passion’ – i.e., a set of impressions and emotions that aesthetic writers liked to share with each other, in private and in print – and, as such, it served as a means to cement an otherwise precarious common identity (see Pemble 1987). Here, it is Italy that gives James the pretext for ‘exchang[ing] a look’ with Symonds, to use his evocative and somewhat flirtatious phrase. Symonds himself was the author of a much reprinted series of Italian sketches (1879) to which James refers obliquely in the letter, and from which he took inspiration for his own Portraits of Places (1883), in which he had just reissued his essay on Venice. All the English writers discussed in this chapter – John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Symonds, Ouida, Vernon Lee – shared the passion for Italy that brought together James and Symonds, and like them they used it as a means to define and defend their aestheticism. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, aestheticism emerged in Britain as one of the most powerful engines of literary modernity, challenging the representational and ethical canons of realism and revolutionising critical practice by departing from the Victorian dogma of didacticism. Paradoxically, aestheticism’s modernity started from a critique of modernity, and this is where Italy was crucial to the aesthetes,

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because they found there a respect for art and the aesthetic that they thought Britain lacked: the sense of timelessness enshrined in Italy’s artistic and historical monuments seduced aesthetic writers like James into believing that the country brought them face to face with the past, in its full sensual intensity, uncorrupted by the distracting forces of modernity. However, we would be mistaken if we believed that English tourists and visitors, whose number increased steadily in the course of the century, arrived in a country that was frozen in time. As early as 1845, Ruskin was horrified to find that in Florence ‘the street that used to run from the post office to the cathedral . . . very narrow & Italian, all full of crimson draperies & dark with old roofs’ had been turned into what seemed to him ‘the Rue St Honoré at Paris – with a whole row of confectioner’s shops fresh gilt, & barbers between, and “Perfumerie et Quincallerie” – within ten yards of Brunelleschi’s monument!’ (Shapiro 1972: 88). In the fin de siècle similar projects of modernisation mushroomed all over the country, with a particular emphasis on infrastructure, sanitation and urban planning. By the early twentieth century, James, who had waxed lyrical over the charm of Rome during his first visits in the 1870s, would bemoan the ‘so bedrenched and vulgarised (I mean more particularly commonised) and transformed City (as well as, alas, more or less, Suburbs) of our current time’ (Lubbock 1920: II.103). As Italy fast gained the attributes of modernity – commercialism, transport and communication networks, streets that looked like Paris, suburbs even – foreign observers were forced to recalibrate their relationship with the country, which resembled less and less the place that had been fixed in the English imagination by the records of educated Grand Tourists and romantic writers such as Madame de Staël, Goethe and Shelley. Sometimes this process generated disenchantment. As James again put it in his essay on Venice, ‘it is through innumerable lapses of taste that this deeply interesting country is groping her way to her place among the nations’ (James 1883: 11). The English aesthetes’ celebration of Italian anti-modernity stems from the radically different political and socio-cultural situation of the two nations. Britain was the metropolitan centre of a powerful and established empire that exerted economic and military domination over five continents. Domestically, it had undergone a process of industrialisation that had made profound changes to its geographical and social landscapes. Italy, by contrast, was a brand-new nation in the fin de siècle, having only achieved territorial unity in 1871 with the annexation of Rome, which completed the first phase of the Risorgimento. It was a divided country with large severely deprived areas, especially in the blighted south. Centuries of political fragmentation had created a deep gulf between the inhabitants of its various regions, who were notoriously hardly able to understand each other’s language let alone share a strong sense of national identity. The same sense of fragmentation pervaded the cultural life of the country. It is therefore unsurprising that a powerful unifying force for fin-de-siècle Italians was a desire for modernisation. In particular, many writers and critics believed that the literary culture of the new united country should become less provincial, arguing that the attainment of true literary modernity would be a product of sustained engagement with foreign trends; or, to put it differently, that Italian literature and culture would only become truly national after having become international. Within such cosmopolitan circles, English aestheticism became attractive precisely as a means of opening the country to modernisation, the more so because of aestheticism’s pre-existing interest in Italian settings and history,

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which made it more readily ‘usable’ from an Italian point of view. It is therefore important to understand the Italian connections of aestheticism – English writers’ interest in Italian art and culture and aestheticism’s circulation in Italy – as intertwined, and part of a broader process of a transnational negotiation of literary and cultural modernity. Too often, aestheticism’s dialogue with Italy has been understood as one-sided, with critics focusing exclusively on how English writers represented Italy and its culture in their writings. In this chapter I suggest that a more fruitful model is one that looks instead for entanglement and cross-pollination, understanding aestheticism in Italy, i.e., as a network of artistic and literary exchanges between the two countries that evolved against the background of Italy’s turbulent history, geographical diversity and desire for cultural modernity.

Italy and Art for Art’s Sake: Ruskin and Pater John Ruskin, whose art criticism laid the foundations for the new culture of art that would be embraced by aestheticism, also played a crucial role in establishing Italy as a privileged place in the discourse on the aesthetic. From the 1830s to the 1880s Ruskin travelled to Italy many times, studying artworks and architecture, and recording his impressions of Italian cities and landscape in an extensive array of published writings as well as drawings, diaries and letters. Over this period, his relationship with Italy developed in the fluid in-between space that stretches between the era of the Grand Tour and the age of Victorian middle-class tourism. His focus of interest was in central and northern Italy, but his real passion was for Venice, which he believed to be at the heart of the history of Italy and European civilisation at large. Ruskin’s descriptions of Italy were meant to seduce English readers by conjuring vivid images of a country that united natural and manmade beauty in a unique way. He therefore blended art-historical accuracy with attention to geography and local colour, registering the multiple sensory impressions of Italy in grand as well as humble locations, forwarding his own subjectivity and perfecting a style that mixed authority with intimacy. At the same time, there was a pronounced didactic drive in evidence throughout his writings, aimed at schooling his readers on the power of the aesthetic and how to manage its ethical potential. For instance, the ecstatic description of St Mark’s cathedral in Stones of Venice (1851–3) was immediately followed by a slight on those who failed to see its splendour, on whom Ruskin poured a dose of his characteristic moral scorn: ‘Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly’; and worse, these ‘knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and listless’ who lounge in the porches, and ‘unregarded children, – every heavy glance of their young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing, – gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after hour’ (Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12: X.84–5). These images encapsulate the conflict that animates Ruskin’s writings on Italy: his desire to abandon himself to the transformative power of the aesthetic is constantly held in check by the self-policing action of class and national prejudices. Moreover the foreign gaze of the English critic is a privileged means to access what the locals, through familiarity and ignorance, cannot see. This is why for Ruskin the artistic beauties of Italy exist almost despite the Italians, who neglect and mismanage them, and certainly fail to be morally elevated by them in the way that he believes possible for his English readers.

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Ruskin’s writings on Italy had an enormous impact on English artistic taste, especially by promoting the so-called ‘primitive’ school of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance (which he had, in turn, learnt about in the works of the French art critic Alexis-François Rio),1 including Cimabue, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Giovanni Bellini and Botticelli. Canonical as these names sound to us now, they were actually quite unorthodox in the English nineteenth century, where the more finished work of Raphael and Michelangelo enjoyed undisputed primacy among critics. Like his descriptions of Italian cities and landscapes, Ruskin’s long, detailed ekphrastic passages on Italian paintings, clearly the product of intense periods of close observation, evoked the seductive power of art, capturing both form (line, texture, chromatic intensity) and a sense of drama. In bravura prose passages the canvases of the Italian masters seemed to materialise on the page, turning many of Ruskin’s works into virtual galleries in which English readers could see Italian art through his eyes, figured through his visionary imagination and strict moral judgement. After the mid-century, Ruskin’s interest in the Italian Middle Ages overlapped with the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, who advocated a return, as Ruskin himself put it, to a method based on drawing ‘either what they see, or what they suppose might have been the actual facts of the scene they desire to represent, irrespective of any conventional rules of picture making’, i.e. of the rules of composition perfected during the Renaissance (Ruskin 1851: 8). Pre-Raphaelitism simultaneously promoted a new way of looking at Italian art and a new significance of the so-called primitive within modernity, but it also resulted in important literary ventures such as D. G. Rossetti’s The Early Italian Poets (1861), the first substantial English translation of Italian lyric verse from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, i.e., some of the earliest poetry written in the Italian vernacular. The preface to this work reveals that Rossetti saw a parallel between his task as literary translator and his endeavours to ‘translate’ in his paintings the special character of primitive Italian art, both of which were motivated by the wish ‘to endow a fresh nation, as far as possible, with one more possession of beauty’ (Rossetti 1861: viii).2 Rossetti’s frank aestheticism makes it easier to see the message that in Ruskin is always qualified and disrupted and buried in moralistic revisions, i.e., that the Italian artistic heritage should be valued by the English quite simply for its ‘beauty’, as at once inspiration and justification for the emerging doctrine of art for art’s sake. Thanks to the mediating influence of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, the Italian primitives eventually became a distinctive element of the artistic taste associated with aestheticism. It is telling that, in his satirical Punch cartoons, George Du Maurier named his over-the-top aesthetic salonnière Mrs Cimabue Brown, after the ur-primitive Italian trecento painter. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the impact of the new taste was limited to small, fashionable, metropolitan circles and artistic coteries. By the 1870s, Ruskin’s art criticism was reaching the ever expanding market of middle-class British travellers to Italy, repackaged in popular guides: Mornings in Florence (1875–7), A Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice (1877) and St Mark’s Rest (1877–84). Ruskin’s wish was that these books would be read ‘in the places which they describe, or before the pictures to which they refer’ (Ruskin 1875–7: I.1), thus providing an alternative to the stereotyped way of looking at Italian sites promoted by Baedeker and Murray, which he openly challenged with characteristic animosity.

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We have already seen that Ruskin was as prone to prejudice and hostility as he was to enthusiasm. When he looked back on his first visit to Rome in his autobiography, Praeterita (1885–9), his first reaction to the Vatican galleries was that they ‘could not give me the least pleasure, and contained a mixture of Paganism and Papacy wholly inconsistent with the religious instruction I had received in Walworth’. Of St Peter’s he laconically noted the ‘clumsy dul[l]ness of the façade, and the entirely vile taste and vapid design of the interior’ (Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12: XXXV.273, 271–2). This is a sixty-oneyear-old Ruskin remembering the impressions of the young man of almost half a century earlier. Yet the same sense of indignation punctuates his art-historical writings, where anti-Catholic prejudice gets in the way of aesthetic enjoyment, generating an abrasive ethical tone that is as characteristic of him as his enraptured ekphrases, and which prompted James to compare him to ‘an angry governess’ (James 1883: 3). Ruskin’s Italy was therefore a place of sharp contrasts: the most sublime medieval art that was a model of humanity, dignity and social cohesion was to be seen side by side with works that embodied the most decadent excesses and moral corruption of the Renaissance, which Ruskin perceived as a real ethical threat to the English viewer. This is why his accounts of Italy are obsessed with the idea of ‘fall’ – a turning point that marks the onset of a long period of corruption and degeneration of Italian art and culture, which according to him stretched from the Renaissance all the way to the present. Ruskin’s idealisation of the Middle Ages was completely overturned by Walter Pater, who celebrated the Italian Renaissance as an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and made keen . . . breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts. There is a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which all alike communicate. (Pater 1980: xxiv) Where Ruskin saw social disintegration, Pater saw individual and collective emancipation, manifested by the works of Renaissance artists, which he described in lavish detail in passages of sustained lyrical virtuosity that surpassed Ruskin’s in subjectivism and visionary intensity. Thus Pater could famously describe Leonardo’s Monna Lisa as ‘a vampire [who] has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave’, and Botticelli’s Madonnas as ‘shrink[ing] from the pressure of the divine child, and plead[ing] in unmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity’ (99, 47). Pater was always particularly sensitive to the presence of secret or perverse contents of Italian art – including, as the example of Botticelli shows, religious art. His gaze was at once hypersensitive and, to use one of his favourite words, antinomian, i.e., not bound by the laws of morality. Pater was keen to rediscover the traces of Italy’s classical and pagan past – a history that was highly problematic to Ruskin, who believed that its inferior sense of morality and social justice had been superseded by the advent of Christianity. For this reason Pater encouraged readers to see Botticelli not as a Christian painter, but as providing a ‘direct inlet into the Greek temper’ (46). Sometimes Pater revisited, as it were, specifically Ruskinian locations in order to correct Ruskin’s gaze. So Raphael’s frescos in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, which Ruskin denounced as sealing the Catholic

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church’s nefarious alliance with paganism in the Renaissance, revealed for Pater the liberal spirit of ‘the classical tradition’, strongly rooted in the Italian soil, which brought about regeneration in the arts as well as society, in the Renaissance as in the present (159–60). In Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), the regenerative force of Italy’s classical heritage and the country’s appeal to northern Europeans are most vividly put forward in the essay on Winckelmann: here Pater showed that, still in the eighteenth century, Winckelmann was recreating a pagan lifestyle in Rome, which enabled him to gain an intimate and, as it were, authentic knowledge of antiquity but also, at the same time, to come to terms with his own homosexual desires, unhampered by centuries of Christian repression. This sympathetic portrayal of the toleration of homosexuality as part of a larger liberal humanism would have been highly problematic to many of Pater’s contemporaries. Moreover, where Ruskin would have been appalled by Winckelmann’s opportunistic conversion to Catholicism in order to gain access to the Roman collections of antiquities, Pater pleaded that ‘at the bar of the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann may be absolved’ (149): for Pater, art and the aesthetic contained their own morality, which did not need the justification of religion. Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance played a crucial role in establishing one of the key principles of English aestheticism: the book defended the aesthetic autonomy of the object – the ‘Conclusion’ contained an impassioned advocacy of ‘art for art’s sake’ (274, cf. 190)3 – freeing criticism from the type of ethical constraints that bedevilled Ruskin. An important corollary of Pater’s aesthetic criticism was that it reduced the distance between the acts of reception and creation, the critical essay becoming a creative outlet in its own right. When Oscar Wilde later argued that criticism should be regarded as equal, or even superior, to the original work of the artist, he used Pater’s description of the Monna Lisa as one of his examples. In Wilde’s dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’, one of the characters confesses how he always recites to himself passages from Pater’s description when he sees the picture in the Louvre, because to him it makes Leonardo’s work ‘more wonderful . . . than it really is’, since Pater treats it not as a sterile object, but as ‘a starting-point for a new creation’ (Wilde 2007: 157). Following Wilde’s logic, we could argue that Pater turned Italian art into English literature in The Renaissance. It is significant, though, that Wilde’s refined dandies go to the Louvre rather than to Italy for their aesthetic epiphanies. For, while it is not seen through Ruskin’s distorting lens of Evangelical Christianity, Pater’s Italy is also undoubtedly less embodied and more distant from the reader than Ruskin’s. Pater travelled far less than Ruskin and maybe it is for this reason that his knowledge of Italy is more museum-bound and bookish, more French: i.e., Italy is often seen through the prism of French sources, whether they be the sixteenth-century humanism of Joachim du Bellay (to whom Pater dedicated an essay in The Renaissance) or the nineteenth-century proto-decadent sensibilities of Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, whose works were very influential on Pater and aestheticism more generally. One aspect of Italian culture in which Pater appeared to be more invested than Ruskin was literature. Ruskin did in fact often approach Italy from a literary perspective, but one that is provided mainly by English authors, especially Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats. By contrast, Pater included in The Renaissance essays on Pico della Mirandola and Michelangelo’s poetry in which he argued that the sonnets, recently translated into English by John Addington Symonds, should be considered alongside

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Michelangelo’s more famous work as a sculptor. Later in life Pater also wrote the introduction for a new translation (1892) of Dante’s Purgatorio by his friend Charles Shadwell, in which he described Dante’s Middle Ages – which he characteristically saw as paving the way for the Renaissance – as ‘a refuge from the mere prose of our own day as we see it, most of all in England’ (Pater 1892: xiv). This last remark about Dante as a ‘refuge’ from a prosaic English modernity highlights an important characteristic that Ruskin and Pater have in common. Different though their approach was to Italian art, they shared the sense that Italy’s true meaning and value were in the past rather than the present. In The Poetry of Architecture (1837–8), Ruskin wrote that Italy’s ‘name and her strength are dwelling with the pale nations underneath the earth; the chief and chosen boast of her utmost pride is in the hic jacet; she is but one wide sepulchre’ (Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12: I.19). Italy was thus a country of ruins, epitaphs, melancholy and mourning; it was a country where beauty was inseparable from death and decay. Pater openly embraced this decadent sensibility, for example when he invited readers to see ‘some shadow of death in the grey flesh and wan flowers’ even in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; or when he claimed that death was Michelangelo’s ‘true mistress’ (Pater 1980: 47, 69). But in Ruskin the decadent taste crept in almost despite the author, who was otherwise intent on preaching moral and social health, and it became more pronounced exactly where Ruskin got more emotionally involved. This is why Venice, the most seductive of Italian cities, was also its most ruined and precarious: it was the place where the sense of loss haunted the present most closely and where desire was most at risk of being tainted by a decadent sensualism. Ruskin tried to turn the spectacle of decadence into a ‘warning’ for modern Britain: Venice, the city that had once commanded a powerful mercantile empire that ruled the waves of the eastern Mediterranean, was now reduced to a crumbling backwater because of its greed – a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak – so quiet, – so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow. (Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12: IX.17) The death-in-life of modern Venice was the spectral manifestation of an imagined future of Britain’s modernity, negatively understood here as a state of inevitable fall.4

English Aesthetes in Italy: Symonds, Ouida, Lee The great poetic authority with which Ruskin and Pater formulated statements about the sepulchral state of nineteenth-century Italy barely masks the fact that, as we have seen, the second half of the century was a period of profound political, social and cultural change – a process that accelerated dramatically from the 1870s onwards. After the foundational writings of Ruskin and Pater, a second generation of aesthetic writers developed a different attitude towards Italy, looking more carefully at its modernity as well as at its past and, as a result, displaying an increased curiosity towards modern Italians, who are never mentioned in Pater’s writings and rarely appear in Ruskin’s, other than as picturesque or grotesque additions to the country’s artworks and landscapes.

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The bridge figure for this second generation of aesthetic writers is John Addington Symonds, who was actually a contemporary of Pater and shared Pater’s background as an Oxford classicist. Symonds was the author of an impressive but neglected study of the Italian Renaissance in seven volumes (Renaissance in Italy, 1875–86), inspired by the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt’s method of Kulturgeschichte, in which he expatiated on social and political history, on the fine arts and literature.5 Like Pater, Symonds believed that the main achievement of the Italian Renaissance was to have generated ‘a renewed and vivid interest in antiquity’ by means of which ‘the Italians brought their arts and some departments of their literature to a perfection that can only be paralleled by ancient Greece’ (Symonds 1875–86: V.494); and like Pater he dissuaded readers from drawing too easy a connection between artistic perfection and political and moral corruption, believing that art should be judged by aesthetic rather than moral standards (art for art’s sake). Compared to Pater’s, though, his investigation of the Italian Renaissance was much more bound to an interest in the meaning and historical destiny of the Italian nation: Symonds wanted to find out what specific part the Italians, as a nation, played in the wider European history of the early modern period and, clearly influenced by the recent events of the Risorgimento, he understood the Renaissance as a reawakening of Italian national consciousness, viewing even the revival of classical learning as ‘a national, a patriotic’ movement, by means of which the Italians got rid of foreign (northern) influences on their culture that had made their way over the Alps during the Middle Ages (505). This consolidation of an Italian national spirit paved the way for a cosmopolitan modernity in which England had its share: for, according to Symonds, the Italian Renaissance had the further merit of having sown the seeds of a universal culture or international consciousness or spirit, which, after the lapse of four centuries, justifies us in regarding the past history of Europe as the history of a single family, and encourages us to expect from the future a still closer interaction of the Western nations. (489) The seven volumes of Symonds’s study show a remarkable erudition and encyclopaedic ambition, but the sheer size of his work makes it, at the same time, less approachable for general readers. Symonds’s philological interest in Italian literature, which was the subject of two volumes of his magnum opus, would also result in some important translations of Italian Renaissance classics: the sonnets of Michelangelo and Tommaso Campanella and the autobiography of the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. Symonds’s work on Michelangelo and Cellini – he published the first scholarly English biography of the former in 1893 – also reveals a perhaps more hidden aspect of his interest in the Italian Renaissance which he shared with Pater, and which has important political implications: unearthing the lives of notable homosexual men from the past in order implicitly to argue for a more tolerant attitude towards homosexuality in the present. Symonds was himself homosexual and had been the victim of bullying and marginalisation because of his sexuality at school and in Oxford, where his academic career was nipped in the bud by the threat of a homosexual scandal. Working on these powerful men who poured their turbulent same-sex passions into their lives and works gave him a means of exploring in public, in an indirect way, the otherwise taboo topic of homoerotic desire. In his

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introduction to Cellini’s autobiography, for instance, he used the metaphor of translation to describe his process of entering into emotional and almost physical intimacy with his historical subjects: The translator is obliged to live for weeks and months in close companionship with his author. He must bend his own individuality to the task of expressing what is characteristic in that of another. He tastes and analyses every turn of phrase in order to discover its exact significance. . . . Supposing him at the same time to be possessed of any discernment, he will be able afterwards to speak of the man whose spirit he has attempted to convey, with the authority of one who has learned to know him intus et in cute – bones, marrow, flesh, and superficies. (Symonds 1889: v–vi) The act of translation enabled Symonds to portray the fantasy of touching, tasting and entering the body of another man; therefore the work of turning Italian into English became a way not only to bridge cultural difference but to liberate kinds of desire that were impossible to articulate within the mother tongue. It wasn’t only on paper that Symonds became intimate with Italian men. After he relocated his family to Switzerland, pushed out of England by a mixture of bad health and social pressure, he started making regular trips to Italy. Venice was the place that attracted him, like Ruskin, most strongly, but Symonds’s experience of the city could not have been more different. In Venice, he was fascinated by the street life of the poor, observing and attempting to mix with those very people whom Ruskin censured for spoiling the view of St Mark’s. Symonds’s Venetian sketches – which, as we have seen, attracted James’s admiration – were always alert to the presence of Italian workers, recording their habits, speech, food, bodies; in one of them he described his impressions of a gondolier’s wedding, full of admiration for the humble dignity of his hosts and fellow guests, and slipping into a patronising tone only when they affected to put on a ‘stiff veneer of bourgeoisie’ (Symonds 1883: 247). His chaperones in this world into which few foreigners dared to tread were Venetian working-class men from whom he occasionally obtained sexual favours, notably the gondolier Angelo Fusato, with whom Symonds established a lasting relationship, during which the two travelled together in Italy and even in Britain, where Symonds introduced his gondolier to the likes of Tennyson (Schueller and Peters 1967–9: III.743–5). Their relationship embodies the paradoxes and economic asymmetry of Anglo-Italian relations at this time. Symonds was a loyal patron of Fusato, and even provided financial support for the latter’s wedding. Fusato in turn enabled Symonds to cross the boundaries of class – a process that was in fact facilitated by linguistic and cultural distance: while Italy brought out the quintessence of Protestant middle-class morality in Ruskin, Symonds, as we have seen, gave vent to a Baudelairean disdain for bourgeois habits, compounded with a discreet but persistent eroticisation of working-class male bodies. In literary terms, the hospitality of working-class Italians enabled Symonds to forge for himself a cosmopolitan voice that mediated a rare and authentic local knowledge for English readers. The difficulty, of course, is that such relations of intimacy were bought, as Symonds occasionally reminded Fusato, and that the literary record is entirely written from the point of view of the English observer, who inevitably inscribes his economic and social privilege in the text, eliding the voice of the gondolier and his kind.

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Symonds’s portrayal of Venetian working-class life was in dialogue with Italian verismo, a brand of realism inspired by the French naturalism of Zola, which gained prominence after the unification. At the end of the nineteenth century verista writers such as Giovanni Verga, Matilde Serao and Grazia Deledda rose to international fame for their stark depictions of the plight of the poor in the more disadvantaged regions of the country. The verista streak in Symonds constantly gives way to symbolist and impressionist turns, notably in his late sketch ‘In the Key of Blue’, where Symonds singled out a nineteen-year-old Venetian facchino (or street porter) and, as he says, ‘pose[d] him in a variety of lights with a variety of hues in combination’, resulting in a series of poetic and essayistic meditations on colour in literature and painting that looked back to Baudelaire and Whistler (Symonds 1893: 4). The English writer who mediated Italian verismo most successfully was, however, Ouida – the prolific popular novelist whose impassioned celebrations of beauty and art, extravagant social performances and attacks on British philistinism brought her close to aesthetic writers, notably Oscar Wilde (see Schaffer 2003: 212–27). After she settled in Florence in the 1870s, Ouida produced a series of novels – including Signa (1875), A Village Commune (1881) and In Maremma (1882) – that sympathetically portrayed the struggle for survival of Tuscan peasant communities, and in these novels she exported the literary aesthetics and politics of verismo to Britain. A Village Commune, for instance, starts with a dedication ‘Al popolo italiano, che molto merita e poco riceve’ (‘to the Italian people, who deserve much and receive little’), and ends with a fiery appendix that exhorts Italians to beware of opportunistic local politicians and foreign speculators who, in the name of selfish profit, would turn Italy into a modern country where ‘[t]he peasant-improvisatrice is to become the hollow-cheeked toiler of mill or machine; the happy husbandman is to become the sullen and savage mechanic with rotten lungs and watery blood’ (Ouida 1881: II.391). Her work was successful in rekindling attention to Italian politics in the British press, attracting the admiration of Ruskin among others (see Ruskin 1883: 30). Awkwardly poised between elite and mass-market readerships, Ouida is also a complex bridge figure in the history of Anglo-Italian literary exchanges in the fin de siècle. On the one hand, she propounded the vision, familiar since Ruskin, of Italy as bastion of aesthetic values that the British had lost, and therefore launched virulent attacks on modernisation and the gospel of progress. The political intervention in the appendix to A Village Commune was thus complemented by numerous periodical articles in which she denounced the extensive programme of urban remodelling undertaken by the Italian government, claiming for instance that [t]he ruin of Rome since the Italian occupation is ten times worse and more offensive than even such ruin as would have been entailed by a siege, for it is more vulgar; shell and shot would have destroyed indeed, but they would not have imbecilely and impudently reconstructed. (Ouida 1896: 40) On the other hand, Ouida was among the first English commentators to acknowledge that that same country in which the past needed so desperately to be preserved and protected could also be the home of literary modernity, both indirectly in her adoption of verismo and explicitly, as we shall see, in her pioneering championing of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Ouida’s fictional and journalistic works about Italy were written from the

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cosmopolitan perspective of the English expatriate: she could claim a privileged, insider point of view on Italian life that gave her writings a power of observation and emotional proximity that her English contemporaries lacked; and at the same time she could denounce the Italians for being unable to administer their heritage, accusing them of having ‘sunk to the position of the most benighted barbarism in art’, activating the same rhetoric of aesthetic disenchantment that we have already seen in James (Ouida 1886: 464). Ouida went further than James, though, theorising Italy as rightfully belonging to a cosmopolitan citizenship based on shared cultural values rather than national kinship, and called on that citizenship to guard what she regarded as Italy’s true identity: historic Italy, classic Italy, artistic Italy, is a treasure which belongs to the whole world of culture, in which, indeed, the foreigner, if he is reverent of her soil, is far more truly her son than those born of her blood who violate her and desecrate her altars. (463) Ouida’s political views could be tendentious (she was, for instance, a very vocal sceptic of Italian unification) but her work found favour in her adopted country: there, she was translated into Italian, contributed to the high-profile literary periodical Nuova Antologia and received the ultimate consecration reserved for Italian verista authors of having one of her novels (posthumously) turned into an opera, when Pietro Mascagni composed his Lodoletta (1917) on a libretto based on Ouida’s Two Little Wooden Shoes (1874). Ouida’s productive exchange with modern Italian literature was taken one step further by Vernon Lee, who was also based in Florence, the Italian city that was home to the most established British expatriate community. Lee made her debut with a series of volumes – Belcaro (1881), Euphorion (1884), Juvenilia (1887), Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895) – in which she followed on the footsteps of Ruskin, Pater and Symonds, navigating the male-gendered field of aesthetics as a woman without a formal university training. It is a testimony to her ambition and achievement that in A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf paid tribute to her as one of the pioneering women intellectuals of the turn of the century (Woolf 1993: 72).6 Indeed, in her many writings on Italian art Lee carved out a special niche as aesthetic critic by pushing further the subjectivism and lyrical style of Ruskin and Pater, and stressing the power of emotion and the senses – in short, the ability to feel – in gaining historical knowledge. In the introduction to Euphorion she described her method of association, whereby the recollection of certain Tuscan farms, the well-known scent of the sun-dried fennel and mint under the vine-trellis, the droning song of the contadino ploughing or pruning unseen in the valley, the snatches of peasant’s rhymes, the outlines of peasants’ faces ran in her mind ‘like so many scribbly illustrations and annotations along the margin of Lorenzo dei Medici’s poems’ (Lee 1884: 14–15). More than for any other aesthetic writer, for Lee the great masterpieces of Italian art and literature that are celebrated by critics abroad were inseparable from these ‘illustrations’, which often manifested themselves to the foreign observer in a deceivingly humble or debased form.

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Lee’s writings on Italy have been well served by critics in recent years (see Maxwell 2003; Fraser 2000). Equally important, though, and inseparable from her Italian writings, is her involvement in local literary circles, and the effect that that had both on her own career and on the circulation in Italy of English aestheticism (see Bini 2004; Cenni, Geoffroy and Bizzotto 2014). While Ouida mixed with aristocrats and cosmopolitan socialites, Lee, only a few miles down the road, sought the company of Italian intellectuals, journalists, writers and academics, with whom she established networks of exchange and mutual support and, in some cases, important personal friendships. At the same time as she wrote for the Contemporary Review, Fortnightly Review and Westminster Gazette, Lee also collaborated with some of the most influential Italian literary journals of the turn of the century, including the Roman Domenica del Fracassa, where she wrote about George Eliot, and the Florentine Marzocco, where she positively reviewed the controversial pioneering Italian feminist novel Una donna (1906) by Sibilla Aleramo. Indeed, in Florence Lee was well placed to take part in the intellectual life of her adopted homeland, for Florence had briefly been the capital of the new kingdom from 1865 to 1871, a short space of time that nonetheless served to reignite the cultural ambitions of a city that was linguistically, if not politically, at the heart of the Italians’ communal identity as a nation. The best part of Lee’s contribution to Anglo-Italian literary relations, however, is unrecorded or, at best, visible only in the margins of the texts, as it took place through the private medium of correspondence or the even more ephemeral medium of conversation. The dedications of her books reveal her debt to some of her Italian friends she held as her intellectual partners. Juvenilia, for example, is dedicated to Carlo Placci – novelist and journalist who wrote about Rossetti, Tennyson and William Morris – whom Lee addresses directly in the introduction and epilogue, emphasising the personal and contextual dimension of her writing whereby the essays become an extension of their unwritten private dialogues; and the second edition (1907) of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880) was posthumously dedicated to Lee’s good friend, the critic Enrico Nencioni, who played a key role in introducing English aesthetic writers to Italian readers. In a series of articles in the Nuova Antologia, Nencioni urged Italians to look beyond France for modern literary trends, recommending Pater in particular as a model for Italian critics who aspired to modernise their style in order to become ‘artisti della parola’ (‘word artists’) (Nencioni 1910: 417).7 Nencioni equated English aestheticism with literary modernity and he believed that, when it came to writing about Italy, foreigners including Lee did a better job than their Italian contemporaries, who too frequently tended to view their own country through the prism of erudition, paralysed by rhetoric and pedantry (343).8 Nencioni also wrote positive reviews of Lee’s books that made her work known to Italians who were not able to read the English originals; but even when he did not write explicitly about Lee, her voice haunted his critical essays, which contained many references to their conversations, in the course of which she would introduce a new writer or make him change his mind about a familiar book.

Aestheticism in Italy Placci and Nencioni are of course only two among the Italian intellectuals who gathered around Lee. Her home, Il Palmerino, served for decades as a space where the Italian and English literary worlds met and confronted each other. Nencioni, for instance, tells

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of having met Amy Levy there (Nencioni 1910: 420),9 while other habitués included the poet A. Mary F. Robinson and the critic Helen Zimmern, who was the editor of English-language Florentine magazines. In 1920, the young Mario Praz made his way to Il Palmerino for the first time, cycling up from the centre of town, having been spotted by Lee as a promising local Anglophile. In his autobiography, La casa della vita (1958), Praz remembered his first afternoon with Lee as a rite of passage into the world of letters – a veritable initiation into English literature as a secluded, attractive space: in his memory, Il Palmerino blended with the Italian houses that Pater describes in Marius the Epicurean (1885), the Italy of the English becoming the gateway into the England of the Italians (Praz 2003: 264–5). Lee became Praz’s mentor, providing him with English literary contacts and facilitating his move to Britain, where he taught Italian in the universities of Liverpool and Manchester in the 1920s and early 1930s; as is well known, Praz would in due course become the most influential Italian critic of English literature of the twentieth century. In particular, his landmark monograph La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930), translated into English as The Romantic Agony (1933), established for the first time the important thematic continuities between the romanticism of the first half of the nineteenth century and aestheticism, renewing interest in the literature of the fin de siècle at the height of the modernist period, when authors like Swinburne and Pater – crucial for Praz – were otherwise deeply unpopular. It seems appropriate that, just as English aesthetic writers had elected Italy as the idealised homeland of the aesthetic autonomy they were striving to promote, it should later be an Italian critic who brought aestheticism back to the attention of English scholars. English aestheticism thus entered Italy by way of its cosmopolitan salons, percolating down from these restricted circles to the pages of literary journals (e.g., Nencioni’s articles in the Nuova Antologia) and from there to the wider culture. Besides Lee’s house, other notable points of entry of English aesthetic culture into modern Italy included the Venetian home of the historian Horatio Brown, much frequented by Symonds,10 and the Roman salon of the art collector Giuseppe Primoli, which was an important nexus for the early Italian circulation of Pre-Raphaelite and aesthetic painting.11 These spaces of sociability were a sort of extra-territorial zone that provided hospitality for temporary visitors, locals and expats: these spaces were, that is, at the same time transitory and permanent institutions where both Italian and English societal norms relaxed, and where, for this reason, eccentricity was tolerated and intercultural dialogue encouraged. There is no doubt that expatriate English women like Lee and Ouida enjoyed a personal and intellectual freedom in such environments that would have been difficult to obtain in England; just as homosexual men like Symonds could afford to be less guarded about their sexuality, as in Italy homosexuality was not punishable by law (unlike in Britain), although it arguably attracted even more social stigma there than it did back home. At the same time, Italian intellectuals like Placci and Praz could use these same spaces to escape the provincial restrictions of nineteenth-century Italian culture, experimenting with new forms of contamination – Praz’s image of Lee’s house morphing into Paterian prose comes to mind. In other words, the Anglo-Italian aesthetic salons were spaces where personal and cultural identities were fluid and pliable, and in this sense they provided an ideal stage for the spirit of curiosity and self-cultivation that is at the very heart of aestheticism, as well as facilitating its mediation between the two countries. The salons must therefore not be thought of as peripheral to aestheticism as practised and written in metropolitan England, but rather as shaping its core mission from abroad.

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It was in Primoli’s house in Rome that Arthur Symons first met the Italian decadent writer Gabriele D’Annunzio in the winter of 1896. D’Annunzio read out his own personal ‘gloss’ on the Biblical parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, which drove the more faint-hearted guests out of the room but predictably fascinated Symons, making him suddenly fall in love with the Italian language – ‘a language of beautiful exteriorities . . . the typical feminine language’ (Symons 1926: 113–14). Over the next few years Symons would publish translations of three of D’Annunzio’s dramas (La Città morta, Gioconda, Francesca da Rimini) and draft two more that remained unpublished (La figlia di Iorio and La fiaccola sotto il moggio), as well as collaborate on the English translation of his decadent novel Il Piacere (1889) made by Georgina Harding (The Child of Pleasure, 1898). Symons would describe D’Annunzio as being like the men of the Renaissance in regarding moral qualities as variable things, to be judged only by aesthetic rules. . . . For to d’Annunzio life is but a segment of art, and aesthetic living the most important thing, for the artist is not merely an artist in words, or canvas, or marble, but an artist in life itself. (Symons 1898: viii) Symons, in other words, saw D’Annunzio as an offshoot of English aestheticism – a modern Italian writer who incarnated what English aesthetes such as Pater and Symonds had found so attractive and transgressive in the Italian Renaissance: the cult of beauty, aesthetic autonomy, the ideal of the aesthetic life as an alternative to nineteenth-century ethical and social codes. Indeed, D’Annunzio’s early work encapsulates the appeal of English aestheticism for a generation of young Italian writers who, as Nencioni had urged, started looking for literary modernity in England as well as France. Like most of his educated Italian contemporaries, D’Annunzio mastered French but not English, at this time when Paris was still the hub of what Pascale Casanova has called ‘the world republic of letters’ and, within Europe and certainly in Italy, English was more widely associated with commerce and politics than literature and the arts (Casanova 2004). However, his work, steeped though it is in French sources, also shows that the balance of international cultural capital was starting to shift. For D’Annunzio repeatedly turned to English aestheticism to construct his own distinctive literary identity and flaunt his cultural cosmopolitanism. In 1887, for instance, when he was very young and virtually unknown, he published a spoof translation of an English aesthetic poet he had invented, followed by his own ‘imitations’ of the new school (see Woodhouse 1998: 55). Two years later, in the aforementioned breakthrough novel Il Piacere, he portrayed fin-de-siècle Rome as pervaded by the taste and atmosphere of English aestheticism: the protagonist is a hypersensitive, dandified poet and collector who practises an extreme form of art for art’s sake, and worships the Renaissance and Shelley’s poems. His later novel Il Fuoco (1900) redeployed Pater’s aesthetic theories and his hybridisation of fiction and criticism against the background of modern Venice, mediated through the work of the Italian art critic Angelo Conti.12 D’Annunzio’s early oeuvre, in other words, was deeply informed by the aesthetic tastes and attitudes perceptively spotted by Symons, which D’Annunzio liked to push to decadent extremes. D’Annunzio used English aestheticism to internationalise Italian literature, so that it could be universally regarded as the peer of the more established European national

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literatures (D’Annunzio’s commitment to nationalism also found a less attractive outlet in aggressive militarism). It is therefore ironic that the early English translations of D’Annunzio’s novels should have been heavily bowdlerised, removing sexual content that was deemed to be potentially offensive to English readers but also, in the process, getting rid of the painstaking stylistic research and web of learned references that act as a counterweight to the novels’ sensational elements. The result was that the tepid texts in English translation were a poor match for the high literary reputation that spread internationally by way of France, where, unlike in England, D’Annunzio had been well served by his faithful French translator Georges Hérelle and supported by influential critics. It is significant that, in Britain, the most vocal advocates of D’Annunzio should have stemmed from aesthetic circles. Symons included D’Annunzio among the new voices of a transnational literary modernity in his landmark article ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893) (Symons 2014), while Ouida wrote a pioneering early review which was full of admiration, albeit she regretted his excessive reliance on foreign influences and argued that his strong decadent flavour meant that he ‘could not be reproduced in English’ (Ouida 1897: 350). Diluted though his writings undoubtedly were, as D’Annunzio rose to international celebrity in the 1890s, the English aestheticism that informed them was not wholly lost in translation. D’Annunzio marks a new phase in the history of English aestheticism in Italy that this chapter has attempted to trace: the doctrines of aesthetic autonomy and the formal experiments that the aesthetes had striven to promote in England via their Italian writings were now becoming domesticated within Italian literary culture, thanks to the work of mediation undertaken by expatriate aesthetes and Italian Anglophile intellectuals, while aesthetic writers themselves began to look to contemporary Italy, and not only to its past, as a source of literary modernity that could challenge English taste. The fact that Symons should conceive of D’Annunzio’s modernity as a return of the spirit of the Italian Renaissance testifies to how complex and discontinuous these processes were. Yet as international literary relations assumed new configurations in the years around 1900, aestheticism continued to be at the heart of the ongoing cultural dialogue between the two countries.

Notes 1. In De la poésie Chrétienne (1836) Rio had given a sympathetic interpretation of Italian medieval art that became highly influential beyond his native France, reaching Italy, Germany and Britain. 2. Rossetti trod in the footsteps of his father, the Italian political exile Gabriele Rossetti, who was a noted Dante scholar and professor of Italian at King’s College London. 3. Pater watered this down in later editions, speaking instead of ‘the love of art for its own sake’. 4. Hilary Fraser (1992: 12–42) explores the trope of death and resurrection; see also Leighton (2003). 5. Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) was a major influence on subsequent treatments of this topic all over Europe. Burckhardt’s influence on Symonds is examined by Fraser (1992: 212–19). 6. Lee was not, of course, the only nineteenth-century woman who made a substantial contribution to the study of aesthetics: see Fraser (2014). 7. The essay, ‘Review of Pater, Appreciations’, originally appeared in the Nuova Antologia on 16 February 1890.

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8. The essay, ‘Review of Lee, Juvenilia’, originally appeared in the Nuova Antologia on 1 September 1887. 9. The essay, ‘Review of Levy’s A London Plane-Tree’, originally appeared in the Nuova Antologia on 1 September 1887. 10. Brown would later act as Symonds’s literary executor. In Venice, Brown came to be considered as a second Ruskin, with whom he contended for the symbolic title of best foreign interpreter of the city. Brown’s works include the popular Life on the Lagoons (1884), Venetian Studies (1887) and Studies in the History of Venice (1907, 2 vols), as well as a translation (1906–8) of Pompeo Molmenti’s monumental history of Venice (1880) and an early biography of Symonds based on his unpublished papers (1895). 11. This topic is explored fully by Pieri (2007), who notes that Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism started to attract attention in Italy roughly at the same time and therefore tended to blur into each other (14–15); see also Bini (2004: 28–33). 12. Conti’s monograph Giorgione (1894) had been heavily influenced by Pater; see Ascari (2004).

Works Cited Ascari, M. (2004), ‘The Fortune of The Renaissance in Italian Art Criticism, 1894–1944’, in S. Bann (ed.), The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe, London and New York: Continuum, pp. 35–45. Bini, B. (2004), ‘“The sterile aesthetic beauty”: Pater and the Italian Fin de Siècle’, in S. Bann (ed.), The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe, London and New York: Continuum, pp. 19–33. Casanova, P. (2004), The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. De Bevoise, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Cenni, S., S. Geoffroy and E. Bizzotto (eds) (2014), Violet del Palmerino: Aspetti della cultura cosmopolita nel salotto di Vernon Lee: 1889–1935, Florence: Consiglio regionale della Toscana. Cook, E. T. and A. Wedderburn (eds) (1903–12), The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols, London: George Allen; New York: Longmans, Green. Fraser, H. (2014), Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking like a Woman, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Fraser, H. (2000), ‘Vernon Lee: England, Italy and Identity Politics’, in C. Richardson and G. Smith (eds), Britannia Italia Germania: Taste and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh: Varie, pp. 175–91. Fraser, H. (1992), The Victorians and Renaissance Italy, Oxford: Blackwell. James, H. (1883), ‘Venice’, in H. James, Portraits of Places, London: Macmillan, pp. 1–38. Lee, V. (1884), Euphorion, 2 vols, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Leighton, A. (2003), ‘Resurrections of the Body: Women Writers and the Idea of a Renaissance’, in A. Chapman and J. Stabler (eds), Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 222–38. Lubbock, P. (ed.) (1920), The Letters of Henry James, 2 vols, London: Macmillan. Maxwell, C. (2003), ‘Vernon Lee and the Ghosts of Italy’, in A. Chapman and J. Stabler (eds), Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 201–21. Nencioni, E. (1910), Saggi critici di letteratura inglese, Florence: Le Monnier. Ouida (1897), ‘The Genius of D’Annunzio’, Fortnightly Review, 61. 363: 349–73. Ouida (1896), ‘The Ugliness of Modern Life’, Nineteenth Century, 39: 28–43. Ouida (1886), ‘Cities of Italy’, North American Review, 143: 462–77.

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Ouida (1881), A Village Commune, 2 vols, London: Chatto and Windus, 1881. Pater, W. ([1873] 1980), The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. D. Hill, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pater, W. (1892), ‘Introduction’, in Dante Alighieri, The Purgatory of Dante Alighieri: An Experiment in Literal Verse Translation, trans. Charles Lancelot Shadwell, London: Macmillan, pp. xiii–xxviii. Pemble, J. (1987), The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pieri, G. (2007), The Influence of Pre-Raphaelitism on Fin de Siècle Italy: Art, Beauty, and Culture, London: Modern Humanities Research Association. Praz, M. (2003), La casa della vita, Milan: Adelphi. Rossetti, D. G. (1861), The Early Italian Poets, London: Smith, Elder. Ruskin, J. (1883), Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford, London: George Allen. Ruskin, J. (1875–7), Mornings in Florence, 6 parts, Orpington: George Allen. Ruskin, J. (1851), Letter to The Times, 13 May, http://www.rossettiarchive.org/docs/n.gb1.1851. may.rad.html Schaffer, T. (2003), ‘The Origins of the Aesthetic Novel: Ouida, Wilde, and the Popular’, in J. Bristow (ed.), Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 212–27. Schueller, H. M. and R. L. Peters (eds) (1967–9), The Letters of John Addington Symonds, 3 vols, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Shapiro, H. I. (ed.) (1972), Ruskin in Italy: Letters to his Parents. 1845, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Symonds, J. A. (1893), ‘In the Key of Blue’, in J. A. Symonds, In The Key of Blue and other Prose Essays, London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane; New York: Macmillan, pp. 1–16. Symonds, J. A. (1889), ‘Introduction’, in B. Cellini, The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. J. A. Symonds, London: Nimmo, pp. v–liv. Symonds, J. A. (1883), ‘The Gondolier’s Wedding’, in J. A. Symonds, Italian Byways, London: Smith, Elder, pp. 231–52. Symonds, J. A. (1875–86), Renaissance in Italy, 7 vols, London: Smith, Elder. Symons, A. ([1893] 2014), ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, in M. Creasy (ed.), The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 169–83. Symons, A. (1926), Eleonora Duse, London: Elkin Mathews. Symons, A. (1898), ‘Introduction’, in G. D’Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure, trans. Georgina Harding, London: Heinemann, pp. v–xii. Wilde, O. ([1891] 2007), ‘The Critic as Artist’, in J. M. Guy (ed.), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Vol. IV: Criticism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Woodhouse, J. (1998), Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Woolf, V. ([1929] 1993), ‘A Room of One’s Own’, in V. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, London and New York: Penguin, pp. 3–103.

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III. Identities: Female

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casual reader of books about the 1890s published in the first decades of the twentieth century might be forgiven for assuming that women’s role in literary society was one of reticence, and only occasionally of distinguished service. Studies such as Bernard Muddiman’s The Men of the Nineties (1920) and Max Beerbohm’s comic parody Seven Men (1919) demonstrate in their titles a gender hegemony which is also to be found in Holbrook Jackson’s The Eighteen Nineties (1913) and Osbert Burdett’s The Beardsley Period (1925), which give no mention of ‘new women’, and do not even devote complete paragraphs to women as such. A small number of women active in literature in the 1890s, notably George Egerton (Mary Chevalita Bright) and John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Craigie), are mentioned approvingly; although it is probably not a coincidence that women with male pseudonyms could be allotted a place in primarily male environments while undisguised female writers of importance, such as Ella Hepworth Dixon and Ménie Muriel Dowie, who receive only a mention, apparently could not. More usually women are simply ignored or treated with contempt, as in Max Beerbohm’s famous comment on Vernon Lee (Violet Paget): Poor dear dreadful little lady! Always having a [bone] to pick, ever so coyly, with Nietzsche, or a wee lance to break with Mr Carlyle, or a sweet but sharp warning to whisper in the ear of Mr H. G. Wells, or Strindberg or Darwin or d’Annunzio! What a dreadful little bore and busybody! (Lambert and Ratcliffe 1987: 121)1 One cause of this neglect was the excessive emphasis on Oscar Wilde, which tilted attention towards maleness, if not masculinity, and helped solidify a set of clichés about the 1890s artistic sensibility. As epitomised by figures like Wilde, as well as by Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lord Alfred Douglas and John Davidson, this sensibility included: an acute awareness of living at the end of the century, at the height of the British Empire, when the hard work of previous generations had produced luxury that was now being enjoyed; a dedication to art and artificiality, but also to realism in writing, often with influence from French prose writers; a looking towards classical civilisation for the eternal truths of art, which was then judged by its own standards, not any external values; and a tolerance of sexual difference (including same-sex relationships) and foibles of personal behaviour without concern for conventional morality. Although these 1890s men behaved differently as individuals – they might be dandies (like John Gray), wretched (like Ernest Dowson), bon viveurs (like Arthur Symons), or reclusive alcoholics (like Lionel Johnson) – they shared a pose of cultural superiority, and assumed the importance of art in life, with a

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frequent blurring of distinctions between one and the other. Thus we have the familiar 1890s artistic type, made influential by those early twentieth-century studies; the aim of the current chapter is to review the contribution of a range of women writers at the fin de siècle, examining their complex relationship with a culture traditionally viewed as dominated by men. A useful place to begin is with that iconic showcase for advanced 1890s writers, The Yellow Book; and here we may note that although Wilde may have been the most talented playwright of the era and the best-known wit, he did not contribute to this journal. Moreover, he was rarely, if ever, seen at such culturally central events as Yellow Book editor Henry Harland and his wife Aline’s Saturday soirées at their home in the Cromwell Road. Likewise, Evelyn Sharp remembers seeing Wilde only twice at John Lane’s offices at the Bodley Head (Sharp 1933: 57). Wilde made his contribution in encouraging women writers during his early career as editor of the Woman’s World (which title he changed from Lady’s World), but thereafter he was a male surrounded largely by young men. Ella Hepworth Dixon wrote a waspish satire of Wilde, whose acolytes ‘copied his neckties and buttonholes, and whom one sometimes saw giggling together in corners, and calling each other by pet names . . . [and] were heard addressing each other as “my dear” ’ (Dixon 1892: 28). Very witty women, such as Ada Leverson and Julia Frankau (who wrote as Frank Danby), were welcomed into his circle, but Wilde did not bestow his literary favours equally. Wendell V. Harris, for example, remarks that Wilde’s influence, with which Lane’s Bodley House premises were presumed to be so infected, ‘is discoverable only in Florence Farr’s The Dancing Faun, and here the imitation of Wildean situation and dialogue is so close that one suspects parody rather than discipleship’ (Harris 1968: 1412). However, evidence of women’s influence on 1890s literary culture is not hard to find in records of works published and reviewed at the time: in contemporary publishers’ lists and in the review pages women take a significant (although rarely equal) position in terms of the number of works produced and critical acclaim of them. From 137 writers of all types who appeared in The Yellow Book, 45 were female, with Fiona Macleod (William Sharp, who wrote with a female persona) making women a third of the total. Linda K. Hughes’s analysis of poetry in The Yellow Book shows an even larger proportion of women’s work: the thirteen volumes had 116 poems, of which 45 were by women, making 37 per cent in all (Hughes 2004: 861). At the level of book publication, the prominence of women is even more marked: of the thirty-three that appeared in the Bodley Head Keynotes series, thirteen were by women (see Fig. 15.1) while another, Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk (1894), was translated by Lena Milman, and The Mountain Lovers (1895) was by Fiona Macleod. Others included such clearly female-subject works as Women’s Tragedies (1895) by H. D. Lowry and The Woman Who Did (1895) by Grant Allen, demonstrating a high degree of interest in ‘women’s books’, if that is taken to mean books by, for or about women. Moreover, it was not only the Bodley Head which strove to appeal to women; women authors also predominated in T. Fisher Unwin’s Pseudonym Library, which was published in a diary-sized and rectangular format, to fit easily into a woman’s purse. It was a series of eighteen-pence books, stiffcovered and paper-bound, whose women writers included John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs Humphry Ward, Edith Nesbit Bland, Vernon Lee and Ouida (Louise de La Ramée). As Laurel Brake remarks, woman is one of the great subjects of The Yellow Book, which had a predominance of females as topics of interest: for example, there is a

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Figure 15.1 George Egerton: Keynotes (1894); title page. female party-goer on the cover and a female piano player on the title page (Brake 1995: 51). The first story in the first issue, Henry James’s ‘Death of a Lion’, shows its narrator’s gender bewilderment in a world where a writer called Dora is a man who ‘only assumes a feminine personality because the ladies are such popular favourites’. In the same issue, marriage features prominently, with unfortunate marriages described by Ella D’Arcy and the co-authors John Oliver Hobbes and George Moore, while Max Beerbohm contributes an essay titled ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’. Margaret Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner note that women were not only invited to contribute to the journal, they were there at the very beginning of the project. The Yellow Book was [t]he only High Art periodical to allow women a voice in defining the concept of ‘Women’ for themselves, whether through literature or through the visual arts. The subject of ‘Woman’ – her so-called essential nature, her rights and duties, her new prominence in the public sphere – was a question that transfixed almost all artists of the nineties, regardless of the schools or movements to which they happened to belong. (Stetz and Lasner 1994: 43) In Dieppe, in summer 1893, among the women who visited or were resident in Sainte Marguerite where The Yellow Book was conceived, were Aline Harland, who wrote as Renée de Coutans, Aubrey Beardsley’s mother Ellen, her daughter the actress Mabel

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Beardsley, and Mabel’s friend the writer Netta Syrett (Stetz and Lasner 1994: 12–13). Syrett was to become a prolific novelist; her first novel, Nobody’s Fault, (1896) was published by John Lane in the Keynotes series. Henry Harland and John Lane sought out literary contributions by women for The Yellow Book, partly because a primary objective was to use the journal to showcase Bodley Head writers, and partly because women were the coming trend: in the spring of 1894 everyone was talking about the new woman (even if that talk was often mockery). There was a new readership of women who were earning their own livings; and in the burgeoning market of the printed word, women were coming to the fore as never before, both in literature and in journalism (as evidenced in the appearance of works like Arnold Bennett’s Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide (1898)). However, Harland and Lane’s promotion of women also owed something to sexual attraction. In an environment where nearly all the positions of power were held by men, figures such as Harland and Lane could use their literary influence to enjoy an ‘easy’ relationship with young women, in a milieu where concepts of free love (unconstrained by the expectation of marriage) were in the air, and literary figures were at the forefront of experimenting with alternative ways of living. Such an atmosphere could also, however, enable an element of sexual predation. ‘Petticoat’ Lane, for example, earned his nickname on account of his amorous pursuit of young women writers; while Evelyn Sharp writes of Henry Harland that he used to refer to her as ‘Darling of my heart! Child of my editing’ (Sharp 1933: 69). Ella D’Arcy, too, describes his ‘assuring some “dear, beautiful Lady” or other how much he admired her writing, or her paintings, or her frock, or the colour of her hair’ (D’Arcy 1994: 33). D’Arcy, who was assistant editor of The Yellow Book, likewise teased Lane about his flirtations, writing to him: Why didn’t you make me Art Editor? Then all the Celia Levetuses, the Mary Holdens, the Mildred Gastans, the Kitties, the Carries, the Annies, the Fannies; all the young Persons, in short, who send you their portraits and write you sonnets unfit for publication; would be kept outside of the Yellow Book . . . What an appalling imbecile your Wild Olive [Olive Custance] seems to be. Such letters of hers as I have found in the Y.B. room, oh, such letters! (D’Arcy 1990: 24–5) The apparent freedom with which D’Arcy dismisses Lane’s flirtations may have been because she was having an affair with him, for it is difficult to imagine a mere office colleague acting so imperiously. That said, she was also close to Harland, and usually attended his Saturday evening soirées. Regardless of any preferment she might have received through her personal relationships with Lane and/or Harland, D’Arcy was a gifted author in her own right who wrote more pieces for The Yellow Book than anyone else, with the exception of Harland, and who was to receive praise for her first volume of stories, Monochromes (1895). However, at some point in 1895 she left The Yellow Book office without indicating when she would return (her friends called her Goblin Ella for her habit of disappearing and turning up again unannounced). At the time Harland had also been communicating with Ethel Colburn Mayne, a short-story writer from Cork, Ireland. Mayne records how, when she submitted a story to The Yellow Book under the name Frances E. Huntley, she received a letter from Harland ‘not only accepting this story but praising it in words which even now it thrills me to recall’ (Mayne 1908). She could not know that such effusiveness, particularly to female writers, was Harland’s usual mode of address, and in December 1895 (and following D’Arcy’s departure) she

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accepted Harland’s offer of employment as the new assistant editor of The Yellow Book, leaving Ireland for London on New Year’s Day 1896. Harland organised rooms for her in London, near his flat in Cromwell Road. Mayne worked diligently until the spring of that year, when Ella D’Arcy returned and demanded her old position; she banished Mayne from The Yellow Book office, spiked a story of Mayne’s that was due for publication, and deleted Harland’s words of praise for her in the next edition. D’Arcy wrote to Lane: [Harland] will, certainly, murder me when he discovers it; he is already very angry because I don’t send him any revise; but of course, I shan’t send him any until I’ve passed it for press, and so my changes have become ‘Irremediable’ – the last word being a reference to the title of a story of hers that appeared in The Yellow Book in April 1894, discussed below (D’Arcy 1990: 24). Harland was not one to witness conflict, and he stayed where he was, which was in Paris. Despairing of receiving just treatment, Mayne waited for some time before eventually returning to Ireland. Harland and Lane’s appalling management style aside, this was, clearly, a complex story of talented women finding precarious work in the publishing industry, of their rivalry, and of their utter reliance on their employers’ patronage. Their vulnerability is suggested in a later letter of D’Arcy in which she expressed the difficulty of being a working woman reliant on small sums: ‘Oh do dear Publisher, get me some work, I’m so low! And to think that all, all my dear little £15 has to go to old debt . . . it’s heartbreaking’ (D’Arcy 1990: 28). Payment for a story was a mere £15. At another time she wrote: ‘I do so want to earn £500 a year. I can’t live on less, and you know my income is not a tenth of that amount’; so she was receiving less than £50 in total (D’Arcy 1990: 24). In all D’Arcy went on to produce two volumes of stories, a novel and a translation. If her office behaviour seems less than sisterly, her writing might have predicted it, for as Benjamin F. Fisher notes, in her stories about bad marriages and the bleak lives of the emancipated women, her female characters tend to be lowminded and scheming with regard to the main chance, ‘which came though marriage to some decent, sensitive male who could not see through proffered easy sex or the masks of other feminine wiles in sufficient time to escape their baneful, even deathdealing consequences’ (Fisher 1992: 184). As noted above, D’Arcy initially met Harland as a result of sending him the story ‘Irremediable’, which he thought so much of that it became one of the pieces published in the first issue of The Yellow Book, alongside work by such well-known writers as Henry James and Edmund Gosse. In D’Arcy’s story a bank clerk, Mr Willoughby, suspicious of women, is pleased to meet a working-class girl, Esther, because of ‘an earlier episode in his career having indissolubly associated in his mind ideas of feminine refinement with those of feminine treachery’ (D’Arcy 1894: 88). He has ‘dabbled a little in Socialism’, and so is moved to render fluid the barriers of class, and enjoys flirting with Esther, a girl from Whitechapel. The location was synonymous with vice and crime, notably since the Jack the Ripper murders of the late 1880s. She tells him of her life of hardship and beatings, and he resolves as a decent man to take her away from all that. They marry on his £130 a year. The story then finds him with a slatternly wife in a house ‘repulsive in its disorder’. Esther ‘never did one mortal thing efficiently or well’ and is scornful of his needs (104). He pines for his bachelorhood of books and solitude while she ‘evince[s] all the self-satisfaction of an illiterate mind’. Thus are presented

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the dangers of inter-class relationships. D’Arcy gives a very sour view of women; in her fictional world, the greater social intercourse between men and women that was permitted in the 1890s led only to deeper bewilderment and more disappointment. D’Arcy’s erstwhile rival, Ethel Colburn Mayne, also had a considerable, although not lucrative, career as a novelist and translator. Yet Mayne’s vision of women was no more uplifting than D’Arcy’s. The women in Mayne’s stories are plain and lonely; the mothers unsympathetic. In her second novel, The Fourth Ship (1908), she writes of the women who wait and watch, with nothing on the horizon but death: There are three ships that we all watch for – the golden-sailed Love; the ship with white sails called The Little Child; the Success with rosy sails. For some of us all come home; for some one or the other, for some, again, none of these comes home. (epigraph) The fourth ship, with black sails, symbolises death. Similarly bleak female lives are also to be found in the work of Ella Hepworth Dixon, whose major contribution to the period is The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) (see Fig. 15.2). The adjective was carefully chosen: the book’s heroine, Mary Earle, is

Figure 15.2 Photograph of Ella Hepworth Dixon when she was writing My Flirtations.

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described as neither ‘new’ nor ‘feminist’ (the latter term would have been possible, the OED’s first record of it being in 1895 and meaning ‘Advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex’). Dixon was well acquainted with the arguments for the women’s cause, yet sidelined them in her own life (Adams 2013). In her novel, Mary Earle’s best friend, Alison Ives, is certainly a feminist (given the 1895 definition). She remarks: ‘All we modern women mean to help each other now . . . If we were only united we could lead the world’; however, the trajectory of the narrative makes this a questionable proposition (Dixon 1894: 255, 213). Thus while her story of Mary Earle, the modern women, does describe inequality in the workplace and the marriage market, Mary’s deeper problem is more to do with her place in nature. Dixon explores this theme by placing Mary in a world where atheism and evolutionary theory are common, if problematic, ways of defining a woman’s place. Mary is the daughter of a science-writer, which reflects Dixon’s own experience, her father being William Hepworth Dixon, editor of the Athenaeum. The Story of a Modern Woman begins with Mary Erle dealing with her father’s funeral arrangements. His deliberately secular funeral sets the tone for a story in which conventional morality as represented by religion is no longer taken for granted. Dixon’s novel could be seen as an attempt to replace outmoded religious ethics with feminist values, with the most vocal representative of these values, as noted above, being Mary’s friend Alison Ives. However, it soon becomes apparent that Alison’s ‘real desire to be in sympathy with her sex’ does not extend to sympathy with her friend (Dixon 1894: 39). We observe this lack of solidarity over Mary’s choice of art as a career: ‘the whole thing is a farce’, Alison comments: ‘No woman ever made a great artist yet . . . but if you don’t mind being third rate, of course go in and try’ (70, 42). Mary badly needs help from her friend, but receives only contempt; Alison’s unqualified assistance is offered only to the poor. As a modern woman, Mary is placed half-way between successfully earning her own living (finally as a journalist) and relying on a good marriage to get on in life. As she is reduced in circumstances she lodges with a woman who had been her family’s servant. Mary rejects her former suitor, Vincent Hemming, who comes to her for relief from his loveless marriage. She is still in love with him, and is tempted, but she will not betray Hemming’s wife. Hemming offers to make her his mistress, but she says: ‘I can’t, I won’t deliberately injure another woman . . . All we modern women mean to help each other now’ (Dixon 1894: 255). Hemming has married not for love – for he does genuinely love Mary – but for wealth and position to a nouveau riche provincial girl, to whom Mary feels effortlessly superior. In contrast to Alison, Mary shows solidarity with the vulgar wife, although she immediately regrets her high-mindedness, feeling it to be a ‘personal triumph’ that Hemming does not love his wife (250). There is no moral uplift, even though Mary has done what she ethically ought to do: ‘What had she done that she was always to be sacrificed?’, she thinks resentfully (261). Juxtaposed with Mary’s actions is the morality of Alison, for whom ‘the torture of the ideal’ was of no more importance than ‘the burden of sex, the lust of life’: these are just transitory moments as ‘the great army of humanity moved on’ in a meaningless procession (231). In a world where only the continuation of the species has any meaning, Mary has failed. Similarly, in ‘One Doubtful Hour’, Dixon’s best story (and indeed one of the best of the decade), a woman older than Mary Earle contemplates her miseries. The terrible monotony of waiting for a man is bleakly portrayed in this work, which

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was first published in the Lady’s Pictorial in 1897, and which Dixon later used as the title piece of a collection of short stories. Here, women, far from supporting or being respectful of each other, are active competitors in the battle for a mate. The story concerns Effie, who is attending a five-shilling dance: But how tired Effie was of balls! She had been to so many in her life, had danced so unceasingly in pursuit of an ever-vanishing husband. She had been trying to look arch, and pretty, and lively for exactly twelve years. (Dixon 1904: 4) Effie calculates how much the men she can see are worth a year. She stands upright with her chin in the air and keeps smiling. Her sisters are ‘borne off in the romping dance. The girls, though plain, were young and fresh.’ The authorial voice, which is effectively Effie’s point of view, is disdainful: they are not even attractive, their youth is their only asset. Effie desperately wants a home of her own and a child, but instead of reproducing, she is endlessly condemned to dance for access to reproductive potential – to a man with the income to maintain her. Effie has been in India looking for a man, but was sent back by her sister-in-law, a woman of ‘whims and caprices’ who had tired of Effie, ‘and had not scrupled to let her see it’. Effie then met a man on the steamer coming back, and he appears at this dreadful dance but now, seeing her with others, he rejects her. On the steamer [t]he ladies had been few, the men numerous; she had not been forced, by competition, to exaggerate her vivacity and charm. . . . [Now s]he had, for all the world, the air of a lean and hungry huntress, and moreover, although he was too gallant to acknowledge it even to himself, that of a hungry huntress of men. (22–3) Effie sabotages her own chance of happiness by making a silly remark – we are not told what it is, but we presume it makes her neediness too obvious. Clearly, as she now realises, her chances have receded to vanishing point. Finally, sick of it all, she commits suicide in her wretched room. The impression is that it is the hopelessness of being an impoverished, unmarried woman which is so bad for her, the man having been at best a sympathetic character, at worst just an interchangeable representative of his gender: it could have been any man that rejected her. In Dixon’s story it is the awful cycle of life which defeats Effie, a point underlined when a baby girl is born to her upstairs neighbours at the point of her death. Questions of self-definition were thus at the heart of what it was to be an independent woman in the 1890s. No quarter was given to single women; they had to make their own way, competing on unequal terms in a market biased towards men. This struggle had intensified in the 1890s because of the effect of an entire generation of women having by now had secondary education (as a result of the Forster Education Act of 1870), with some having had the benefit of a university education. The first women’s residential higher education college, Girton, opened in Cambridge in 1873 after an experimental start in 1869. There was additionally the need for many women to work in order to keep themselves, due to a preponderance of women over men. By the 1901 census there would be one and a quarter million ‘surplus’ women in the British Isles. There were simply not enough husbands for the available women, even if conventional marriage had been the objective of all of them.

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Thus although by the 1890s the phenomenon of independent-minded women making their own choices was not particularly ‘new’, the concerted expression of discontent was. As early as 1868 Eliza Lynn Linton, in reacting against what she saw as unfeminine behavior, had castigated ‘The Girl of the Period’. By the 1880s, when she republished her essays as a book, she was in no mood to retract, describing how ‘one of the modern phases of womanhood – hard, unloving, mercenary, ambitious, without domestic faculty and devoid of healthy natural instincts – is still to me a pitiable mistake and a grave national disaster’ (Linton 1883: vii). Her novel The One Too Many (1894), which is dedicated to ‘the sweet girls still left among us who have no part in the new revolt but are content to be dutiful, innocent and sheltered’, is a scathing criticism of four Girton-educated girls, in which, as Valerie Sanders comments, there are no positive examples either of womanhood or of marriage; it is all attack with nothing to defend (Sanders 2012: 38). It is perhaps ironic that Linton should be so harsh on career women when, as the first woman to have a staff job on a national newspaper (she joined the Morning Chronicle in 1848), she embodied the goals to which the modern woman apparently aspired. In a similar way, the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward, with her Anti-Suffrage Association, demonstrated how successful a woman could be in the public arena, while actively trying to deny her sex formal expression of their rights. Linton, although emphatically not a decadent, was nonetheless not above gender shifting; in The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (1885), for example, she told her own life story in the persona of a man. ‘New Woman’ was a term originally coined by Ouida in 1894 in an article critical of the emergence of ‘The New Woman with her fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge, her over-weening estimate of her own value and her fatal want of all sense of the ridiculous’ (Ouida 1894: 615). The new woman questioned her assigned role as daughter, wife and mother, with particular emphasis on the unsatisfactory nature of marriage for women. Of course criticism of marriage was nothing new; in 1888, in the Westminster Review, Mona Caird had famously called marriage a ‘vexatious failure’, but this was considered very old news by younger women writers of the 1890s. In John Lane’s records there is a reader’s report from Evelyn Sharp advising rejection of a collection of Mona Caird’s essays on marriage on the grounds that: to talk now of the slavery of woman, of her one destination being marriage, and of her physical growth being stunted and neglected, especially in such strong uncompromising terms as are employed by Mrs Caird, seems out of date if it is not absurd. It is generally a woman’s own fault nowadays if she is tyrannised over by anybody, least of all by her home whether she is married or single, and it seems a pity to have written such long essays in order to tell people facts that are patent to everyone and are working out their own remedies every day. (Sharp n.d.) Sharp was a socialist and was later to be an active suffragette, so this was not the view of a reactionary anti-feminist. Lane accepted her recommendation not to publish, and Caird’s essays were eventually brought out as The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman (1897) by the considerably less prestigious George Redway. Despite negative stereotyping, it is reasonable to see new woman thinkers and writers as having in common a desire for self-assertion and the search for a more satisfying life.

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The political expression of these ambitions was the right to higher education, to work in professions which had previously been barred to them, to vote and to stand for public office – all areas in which progress had been made in the nineteenth century.2 Life for an elite woman with a supportive family and a good education had arguably never looked better in the 1890s. Yet for those whose families were controlling, dismissive of their employment efforts and contemptuous of their failure to ‘find a husband’, life could still be a constant challenge. In this respect, a common personal expression of this desire for greater freedom was the right to a latchkey – that is, for a young adult woman to have the same rights as her brother to come and go in her own home, without the accompaniment of a chaperone. It was for this reason that Lane’s Keynotes series took as its symbol a latchkey (the title coming from George Egerton’s collection of short stories): each book had a separate cover design and keynote monogram – a key with the author’s initials – by Aubrey Beardsley. Egerton later described her motivation for Keynotes: I realised that in literature everything had been better done by man than woman could hope to emulate. There was one small plot left for her to till: the terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as a man liked to imagine her – in a word to give herself away, as man had given himself in his writings. . . . Unless one is androgynous, one is bound to look at life through the eyes of one’s sex, to toe the limitations imposed on one by individual psychological functions. I came too soon. If I did not know the technical jargon current to-day of Freud and the psychoanalysts [sic], I did know something of complexes and inhibitions, repressions and the subconscious impulses that determine actions and reactions. I used them in my stories. I recognised that in the main, woman was the ever-untamed, unchanging, adapting herself as far as it suited her to male expectations; even if repression was altering her subtly. (Gawsworth 1932: 58) As Wendell V. Harris remarks, Egerton discards the ‘tiresome scene setting still so common in short stories of the time’ to create stories made up of a series of episodes which reveal the mental development of the central character (Harris 1968: 1409). There is none of the detail conventionally employed to provide an external continuity, the structure of the work is of trains of thought including illogical and wayward thoughts. In the first story, ‘A Cross Line’, Egerton poses the question why a refined, physically fragile woman will mate with a brute, a mere male animal with primitive passions – and love him – the why strength and beauty appeal more often than the more subtly fine qualities of mind or heart – the why women (and not the innocent ones) will condone sins that men find hard to forgive in their fellows. (Egerton 1893: 22) Her semi-autobiographical The Wheel of God (1898) shows the most remarkable examination of a particular type of female identity in nineteenth-century literature. It is dedicated ‘to my dear father’, who was the first of the idle, drunken, sponging men whom she loved. Egerton’s passion for feckless men in her life and in her work is also anything but new or feminist, although talking about it, as explicitly as she did, was very modern. Her central character is actually empowered by the weakness of the men she chooses:

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It was difficult for Mary, with her great tenderness for all weak, erring and helpless things, her tendency to trace back to the seed and root of everything, to keep her resentment. After all, his very weakness, the very poverty of his nature, gave him a mortgage on her strength. She laid her hand on one of his and patted it, as she might have done to a little child. (Egerton 1898: 263) In another example of her unsentimental gaze she describes a woman who has been beaten up by her partner, noting how the woman was ‘sorrowful in secret for the wild bursts of tenderness that came with a realisation of what he had done to her in his cups, and were the supreme moments of her existence’ (283). Contemporary critics confronted with such unblinking realism were appalled. Hugh E. M. Stutfield raged at the use of sex by Egerton and other writers: Their chief delight seems to be in making their characters discuss matters which would not have been tolerated in the novels of a decade or so ago. Emancipated woman in particular loves to show her independence by dealing freely with the relations of the sexes. Hence all the prating of passion, animalism, ‘the natural workings of sex’ and so forth, with which we are nauseated. Most of the characters in these books seem to be erotomaniacs. (Stutfield 1895: 836) Edgerton, and by implication all new woman writers, were satirised by Owen Seaman in the persona of Borgia Smudgiton in Punch, which only served to make more people aware of the stereotype of modern women writers, and therefore of the issues that caused such controversy. As well as greater realism in describing heterosexual relationships, one of the chief characteristics of the cultural scene in the 1890s was a more open attitude to alternative sexuality. While this became scandalous for males in the Oscar Wilde debacle of 1895, for a woman, such expression was circumscribed by societal attitudes which limited female activity outside the home, while simultaneously encouraging within it, and without blushes, intensely close female friendships. For women to live together was a commonplace, rendered acceptable by, as noted, the excess of women over men in the population and the need to economise. For the same financial reasons it was entirely unremarkable for people of the same sex to share a bed. There was therefore no external reason, discernible to an outside observer, for lesbians to be singled out for censure: the relationship of bestselling author Marie Corelli and her lifelong partner Bertha Vyver, for example, was not put under scrutiny until the late twentieth century. Similarly, the relationship between the writing couple known as Michael Field was not subject to prurient attention at the time, despite much of their work being devoted to the subject of female love. Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper lived on inherited wealth in a home in Reigate where they devoted themselves to literature and the pursuit of beauty. Although horrified by The Yellow Book, they had friends such as Walter Pater, A. C. Swinburne, Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde; as Emma Donoghue comments, the Michaels’s sexual identities were complicated by the fact that, apart from each other, they much preferred men to women, and rather more complicated by their erotic and almost religious adoration of their dog (Donoghue 1998: 9). Yet it is well to be reminded, as Lisa K. Hamilton remarks, that Max Nordau’s scathing assessment of Wilde and his

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contemporaries invoked ‘Sodom and Lesbos’ as twin territories of decadent degeneration (Hamilton 1999: 67). Lesbianism was thus an element of the decadent sensibility, if not always as openly attacked or acknowledged. In this respect, Olive Custance is an interesting (if somewhat neglected) figure to consider, as she enjoyed close relationships with literary homosexuals, both male and female; yet apparently had no interest in the political or social issues arising from same-sex relationships. Custance was born into a wealthy family of country landowners; she delighted in nature and the rustic freedom of her girlhood, which permeates much of her work. Harland published her poems in The Yellow Book and maintained a flirtatious correspondence with her. She had relationships (which may not have been physical) with John Gray, Henry Harland and Richard Le Gallienne; and also became a figure in the world of American lesbian poet Natalie Barney and her Sapphic circle. Custance apparently delighted in Barney’s attentions, writing: For I would dance to make you smile, and sing Of those who with some sweet mad sin have played, And how Love walks with delicate feet afraid ’Twixt maid and maid. (Whitney 2001: 49) Custance’s life (and loves) show the fluidity of personal experience that was possible to a talented woman who had sufficient means not to worry about earning a living. Custance began a romantic correspondence with Wilde’s erstwhile lover Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom she eloped. Their letters show an affection encompassing fluid gender roles: he was attracted to her boyish figure and she to his feminine good looks. Despite what seems to have been a promising beginning, the marriage did not turn out a great success; yet they stayed in contact, writing to each other until their deaths (which happened within a year of each other). Custance published four volumes of verse in all, the last coming out in 1911. Another female writer, also connected to male decadent circles, but who stands in an interesting contrast to Custance, was the Irish artist and poet Althea Gyles. A friend of Wilde and W. B. Yeats, and one-time lover of Leonard Smithers, ‘publisher to the decadents’ (Nelson 2000), Gyles lived a bohemian lifestyle of poverty and religious dedication to art, not unlike that of Ernest Dowson, whom she also knew, and for whom she did a book cover design. Her grasp of the commercial realities of publishing, however, were so weak that she prevented publication of her only book of verse by attempting to insist on an inscription ‘to the beautiful memory of Oscar Wilde’: her putative publisher might have compromised on a dedication to Wilde, but not the word ‘beautiful’, thus no volume of Gyles’s verse appeared in her lifetime (Adams 2000: 57, 178). Sexual licence was clearly more difficult for women than men, but once they had broken the bonds of propriety, women such as the poet who became best known as Graham R. Thomson lived life much as they pleased. She was born Rosamund Ball in Hackney, London; family opposition prevented her early aspiration to attend art school, but she was to develop in literature and was to complete six sensual volumes of poetry. Her erotically charged work was full of decadent images of love and death, such as in ‘Vespertillia’, a poem of supernatural love where a young man meets a woman, perhaps a vampire, while out in the country, and refuses her offer of love. Her themes were frequently ‘death, disillusionment and the failure of love’ (Hughes 2005: 316). Her life was ‘modern’ in her numerous marriages and affairs. After an early

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marriage and a separation, she paired up with a painter, Arthur Graham Thomson, in 1886. In 1894 she became the lover of H. B. Marriott Watson, a writer from the circle of W. E. Henley. They never married, but she adopted his surname. The high literary standing she attained as an individual was compromised for the public by her name changes – she published under three names in all – and despite her prodigious output, she fell into obscurity after a nervous breakdown at forty-three, followed by her death from cancer at fifty-two. The lives of adventure and romance lived by many of the women who came to prominence in the 1890s thus belie the notion that propriety was necessary for a literary career, but some with promising careers did come to grief through personal scandals. Leila Macdonald was a poet who had work in both The Yellow Book and the Savoy (see Fig. 15.3). She and her husband, the important realist author Hubert Crackanthorpe, were a golden couple of the 1890s avant-garde literary scene. The marriage began to move into difficulties after she lost a child she was carrying. She left for Europe and turned up in Paris with a French artist. Meanwhile her husband had already started an affair with Sissie Welch, the sister of Richard Le Gallienne, and all four of them lived in a Paris apartment. Things did not go well, for Leila demanded a divorce, on the grounds

Figure 15.3 Leila Macdonald, The Love of the Poor, 2 April 1896; first page.

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of ‘legal cruelty’: that Hubert had communicated a venereal disease to her. Hubert left and drowned himself in the Seine. His death in 1896 was seen as the zenith of Yeats’s ‘tragic generation’ and the loss of a great artist; it was seen by anti-decadents as a just punishment for worshipping strange gods. Leila was blamed by Crackanthorpe’s family, who made her renounce any claim she might have had to inheritance, and literary life thereafter excluded her. Her single volume, The Wanderer and Other Poems, came out in 1904, with a despairing verse ‘Unwoven’ that seems demonstrative of her life, with its line ‘the fang of cunning stings beyond repair’ (Macdonald 1904: 86). Faced with moral excoriation, she had no contemporary defenders, and the falsehood persisted in memoirs of the 1890s that Crackanthorpe had killed himself because Leila had run off with another man. Another woman whose free-living attitudes came up against contemporary morality was Ménie Muriel Dowie, who came to fame as a traveller with her book A Girl in the Karpathians: it described a lone trip she took in Poland in 1890, undaunted by the threat of wolves and bears (see Fig. 15.4). Her novel Gallia was a bestseller of

Figure 15.4 Ménie Muriel Dowie as A Girl in the Karpathians.

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1895. It is most noted for its preoccupation with eugenics and its general explicitness. The Saturday Review remarked that Dowie has gone further in sheer audacity of treatment of the sexual relations and sexual feelings of men and women than any woman before. Gallia is remarkable for extraordinary plainness of speech on subjects which it has been customary to touch lightly or to avoid. The anonymous reviewer recommends it as ‘rather a book for the study than for the drawing-room’; that is, for the reading of gentlemen, not ladies (Anon. 1895: 383–4). However, the Saturday Review devoted almost three full columns of print to Gallia, demonstrating that despite this disapproval, it was not relegating women’s fiction. The eponymous heroine of Gallia makes a Spencerian suggestion that the ‘evolution’ of an emancipated woman is not a metaphor but an actual part of the natural cycle: ‘You cannot make yourself the old style of woman; you cannot interfere with the clock of evolution that is wound up and goes on in each one of us’ (Dowie 1995: 41). That is, Gallia was representing a view that social progress follows the same rules as biological evolution, a fashionable notion at the time. Indeed the book is drenched in ideas of evolution and eugenics. Dark Essex, the love interest, is writing a tract on emotion in animals in response to one of Darwin’s works. Essex offers ‘an unprejudiced consideration of the emotional capacity in women’; Gallia suggests: a man may love a woman and marry her; they may be devoted to each other, and long for a child to bring up and to love; but the women may be too delicate to run the risk. What are they to do . . . Sacrifice the poor woman for the sake of a weakly baby? No, of course not, but get in a mother . . . lifting a burden from the shoulders of the weak and placing it on the strong. This is ‘treating the world as a sort of farm and men and women merely as animals’, one woman says. In response, Gallia remarks: ‘if the increase of the lower classes could be taken out of their own hands and supervised on scientific lines, crime as well as a number of diseases would be stamped out’ (109, 113, 115). Dowie takes this idea further than the common concern about the reproductive rates among the poor, and applies her thinking to the couplings of the middle class. Gallia wants to marry Dark Essex in order to have his children, but he falls out of favour because of his tiny hands and feet, which ‘gave her a feeling of discomfort’. Later her fears are realised as it is revealed that he has hereditary weakness: ‘A man with pronounced heart-disease ought not to marry. Nothing is more inevitably hereditary’, he says (Dowie 1995: 167, 200). Gallia does marry the other love interest, Guerdon, despite his seducing a teenage girl, keeping her as his mistress and impregnating her, which is given as an evidence of his virility and suitability for marriage. She says to Guerdon that she does not love him, But I admire you; you fill out my idea of what a man should be, not only in looks, but in qualities . . . I have wanted the father of my child to be a fine, strong, manly man, full of health and strength. A man who is a man, whose faults are manly; who has never been better than a mere man in all his life. (192)

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As Gail Cunningham notes, Dowie has constructed a new woman masculinity in which the male body becomes the ‘object of female scrutiny and evaluation, and manliness is comically reduced to the functional ability to breed’ (Cunningham 2002: 96). Dowie faced a similar demolition by scandal to that of MacDonald. She was married to a journalist who was later a member of parliament and with whom she had a son. An affair with her husband’s best friend led to divorce, but her husband was allowed to dictate the terms and he refused to allow her access to their son, whom she was not able to meet until he was over twenty-one. It is impossible to say whether her lack of productivity was connected with this trauma, but she wrote no more books after the divorce. As these brief examples show, women writers in the 1890s presented in their work many of the characteristics commonly associated with fin-de-siècle society, including a taste for new sexual relationships, a questioning attitude towards marriage, and an interest in eugenics;3 many were also published by houses associated with what was then termed the English decadent movement. Although no woman actively adopted the term ‘decadent’ to describe herself in the 1890s, their contribution to literary culture in the late decades of the nineteenth century was rich and diverse, and demands more attention.

Notes 1. Ironically, given the mention of Nietzsche, it was a woman (George Egerton) who was one of the first writers in English to mention Nietzsche in fiction, in her Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894). Although the poet John Davidson had previously translated some passages from Nietzsche, it is arguably Egerton’s work that did more to bring Nietzsche’s ideas into the mainstream. 2. In this respect an interesting connection between several of the women discussed here is Scandinavia: George Egerton travelled to Scandinavia, learned Norwegian and Swedish, and translated the stories of Ola Hansson and the work of Knut Hamsun, with whom she had a brief affair. Fellow Yellow Book writers Evelyn Sharp and Ella Hepworth Dixon also visited Scandinavia and wrote about their travels. Sharp in particular commented: ‘What struck me more than anything else in Denmark was that women were regarded there simply as human beings. Men did not make a fuss about them, did not rush to open the door for them as though they were incapable of doing it for themselves, or ask their permission to smoke, as in pre-war days politeness demanded of the Englishman. They omitted these gallantries and never made a woman feel that she belonged to a different sphere . . . Even late at night a woman could go alone into any restaurant in Copenhagen for a meal without attracting the least notice’ (Sharp 1933: 109). 3. The writers discussed here also, of course, had their own preoccupations: Mona Caird was as committed to ending vivisection as to criticism of marriage; Evelyn Sharp laboured on women’s suffrage work while she longed to be writing fairy stories.

Works Cited Adams, J. (2015), ‘Ménie Muriel Dowie: The “Modern” Woman of Choices’, English Literature in Transition, 58. 3: 313–40. Adams, J. (2013), ‘Feminist Solidarity in the Life and Work of Ella Hepworth Dixon’, Latchkey, 5, www.oscholars.com

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Adams, J. (2009), ‘The Drowning of Hubert Crackanthorpe and the Persecution of Leila Macdonald’, English Literature in Transition, 52. 1: 6–34. Adams, J. (2000), Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, London: I. B. Tauris. Anon. (1895), ‘Gallia’, Saturday Review, 23 March. Beerbohm, M. (1919), Seven Men, London: Heinemann. Brake, L. (1995), ‘Endgame: The Politics of The Yellow Book or Decadence, Gender and the New Journalism’, in L. Brake (ed.), The Endings of Epochs, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, pp. 38–64. Burdett, O. (1925), The Beardsley Period, London: John Lane. Caird, M. (1897), The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman, London: George Redway. Cunningham, G. (2002), ‘“He-notes”: Reconstructing Masculinity’, in A. Richardson and C. Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, London: Palgrave, pp. 94–106. D’Arcy, E. (1994), ‘Yellow Book Celebrities’, English Literature in Transition, 37. 1: 33–7. D’Arcy, E. (1990), Some Letters to John Lane, ed. A. Anderson, Edinburgh: Tragara Press. D’Arcy, E. (1894), ‘Irremediable’, Yellow Book, 1: 87–108. Dixon, E. H. (1904), One Doubtful Hour and Other Side Lights on the Feminine Temperament, London: Grant Richards. Dixon E. H. (1894), The Story of a Modern Woman, London: Heinemann. Dixon, E. H. (1892), My Flirtations, London: Chatto and Windus. Donoghue, E. (1998), We Are Michael Field, Bath: Absolute Press. Dowie, M. M. (1995), Gallia, London: Everyman. Egerton, G. (1898), The Wheel of God, New York: G. P. Putnam. Egerton, G. (1893), Keynotes, London: Matthews and Lane. Fisher, B. T. (1992), ‘Ella D’Arcy: A Commentary’, English Literature in Transition, 32. 2: 179–89. Gawsworth, J. (1932), Ten Contemporaries, London: Ernest Benn. Hamilton, L. K. (1999), ‘New Women & “Old” Men: Gendering Disintegration’, in T. Schaffer and K. A. Psomiades (eds), Women and British Aestheticism, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, pp. 62–80. Harris, W. V. (1968), ‘John Lane’s Keynotes Series and the Fiction of the 1890s’, PMLA, 83. 5: 1407–13. Hughes, L. K. (2005), Graham R. Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters, Athens: Ohio University Press. Hughes, L. K. (2004), ‘Women Poets and Contested Spaces in The Yellow Book’, Studies in English Literature, 44. 4: 849–72. Hughes, L. K. (2001), ‘Rosamund Marriott Watson (Graham R. Thomson)’, in W. B. Thesing (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography. 240: Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets, Detroit: Gale, pp. 308–20. Jackson, H. (1913), The Eighteen Nineties, London: Grant Richards. Lambert, J. W and M. Ratcliffe (1987), The Bodley Head 1887–1987, London: Bodley Head. Linton, E. L. (1894), The One Too Many, London: Chatto and Windus. Linton, E. L. (1883), The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays, London: Richard Bentley. Macdonald, L. (1904), The Wanderer and other Poems, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Mayne, E. C. (n.d.), ‘Reminiscences of Henry Harland’, MS, University of Delaware, Mark Samuels Lasner Collection. Mayne, E. C. (1908), The Fourth Ship, London: Chapman and Hall. Muddiman, B. (1920), The Men of the Nineties, London: Henry Danielson. Nelson, J. G. (2000), Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson, High Wycombe: Rivendale Press. Ouida (1894), ‘The New Woman’, North American Review, 158. 450: 610–19.

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Parker, S. (2013), The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity 1889–1930, London: Pickering and Chatto. Pulham, P. (2006), Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, London: Palgrave. Sanders, V. (2012), ‘Victorian Marriage and the Antifeminist Woman Novelist’, in N. D. Thompson (ed.), Women Writers and the Woman Question, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 24–41. Sharp, E. (n.d.), Readers’ Reports 1894–99, Harry Ransom Centre, John Lane Collection; folder 64.5. Sharp, E. (1933), Unfinished Adventure, London: John Lane. Souhami, D. (2004), Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney & Romaine Brooks, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Stetz, M. and M. S. Lasner (1994), The Yellow Book: A Centenary Exhibition Catalogue, Cambridge: Houghton Library. Stetz, M. and C. A. Wilson (2007), Michael Field and their World, High Wycombe: Rivendale Press. Stutfield, H. E. M. (1895), ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 157: 833–45. Whitney, M. C. (2001), ‘Olive Custance’, in W. B. Thesing (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography. 240: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets, Detroit: Gale, pp. 46–53.

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16 When a Bestselling Author and a West End Actress Made a Spiritualist Performance: Collaboration, Networks and Theatre at the Fin de Siècle Catherine Hindson

This drama is a story which has been told in all ages, and among every people. It is the tragedy of the soul. Mabel Collins, opening to the published playtext of The Story of Sensa

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n April 1914, a one-off copyright performance of a three-act play was staged at London’s Court Theatre on Sloane Square. Three further stagings of the play followed in 1919, at the Florence Etlinger Theatre School on Paddington Street. As far as I can discover, these four occasions represent the full production history of Sensa: A Mystery Play in Three Acts, adapted by the bestselling author Mabel Collins (1851–1927) and the celebrity West End actress Maud Hoffman (?1869–1953) from Collins’s influential spiritual text The Idyll of the White Lotus (published in 1884). In many ways these four performances are tiny – and some might well argue inconsequential – moments in the histories of fin-de-siècle theatre and culture. In this chapter I argue the opposite, suggesting that seeking out seemingly minor occasions that have not been woven in to the grand narratives of the fin de siècle and modernism(s) can open up access to the period’s myriad performances and audiences and enable us to consider the intersections between them. Collins and Hoffman were professional polymaths, familiar international celebrities, practising occultists and active members of the suffrage campaign. Their day-to-day working, spiritual and personal lives demanded that they moved between and bridged communities, groups and networks. Sensa bears the traces of this hybrid activity. The play makes visible a nexus of experimental performance techniques, the visual cultures of the West End stage, occult and esoteric philosophies, celebrity strategies and representations, professional practices and radical politics. Locating the four stagings of the play in their wider contexts – amidst esotericism, sensation fiction, the periodical press, the fashionable commercial stage and London’s fame industry – unsettles boundaries between venues, audiences, popular performance, experimental theatre, disciplinary foci and artistic forms, and prompts questions about how West End theatre, popular fiction and celebrity were woven into, and not separate from, the cultural fabric of fin-de-siècle performance.

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Sensa: A Mystery Play in Three Acts Writing a plot synopsis for a play is never an easy task. Writing a plot synopsis for Sensa presents a particular set of challenges. Collins and Hoffman’s play was an early experiment in total theatre for large performance venues. As the opening stage directions signal, the piece deliberately and overtly functioned on multiple theatrical and sensory levels. Act One, Scene One Period: Ancient Egypt // Time: Dawn Place: A broad green plain outside a massive Temple on the banks of the Nile. The river can be seen winding away in the distance. ‘The Morning Hymn to Ra at the Rising of the Sun’, is just dying away within the Temple. The play’s directions for narrative, rituals, music, speech and embodied performances are interwoven. Simultaneously, each of these strands of theatrical meaning-making offers access to a different level of information and carries a distinct ongoing layer of narrative. The majority of the play’s action takes place in one location: the main set represents the interior of an Egyptian temple, with columns, doors and curtains creating a circular performance space. Hieroglyphs cover the columns. Priests process across the stage, clothed in symbolic, embroidered robes. Descriptions of their costume and movement are embedded in the playtext, alerting us to their significance. The High Priest Agmahd’s first entrance, is narrated by another character: ‘How slowly he walks’, he comments, ‘like some great being far removed from men. His dress is all white, embroidered with gold, and his beard that lies upon it, might be cut in gold’ (Collins and Hoffman 1950: 4). The moment of speech works on two levels, drawing the spectators’ attention to the character and identifying the importance of these performance elements to anyone considering staging the work. Instructions for the play’s soundscape, an aural narrative created from chanting, singing, discordant music performed on wind instruments and running water, are detailed, and again, references to the play’s sounds are contained within the speech of its characters. The 1919 production of Sensa included incidental music in the Greek modes by the Australian composer Elsie Hamilton (1880–1965), supported by the Natural Intonation Society. Both Hamilton and the Society were known for their shared desire to ‘express the inner life and spirit of the age by removing old landmarks [from musical composition] and abandoning major and minor scales in favour of ancient modes’ (Musical Times, 1 November 1917: 483). On this occasion Hamilton’s score baffled the reviewer from the Musical Herald, who could ‘frankly make neither head nor tail of it’ (1 August 1919: 264).1 This was not the incidental music of melodrama and other West End stage spectacles, designed to underwrite and enhance emotional or dramatic action. Sensa’s music was designed to prompt different psychological modes of interpretation and embodied responses from the play’s audience and performers. Accompanying the sights and sounds offered by the play was an olfactory narrative. There are four separate occasions in the playtext when the use of incense or perfume is required by the stage directions. One of these moments instructs that eight incense bearers should process around the stage space, another that fragrant liquid

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should be poured and its ‘strong pungent perfume’ fill the air (Collins and Hoffman 1950: 22, 30). Performers are instructed to inhale the incense deeply, acknowledging its presence and leading the audience to follow suit (7). The play’s main character, Sensa, comments on the suffocating closeness of the air that is caused by the incense and perfume being used in the production (29). The length of the playtext, with the non-written action taken into account, suggests that the play’s running time would have been approximately an hour and a half, and it is likely that the accumulation of scents used in the production would have been a powerful element of the experience for those seated close to the stage. Colour is also used within the multi-sensory environment constructed by Collins and Hoffman. The play’s chromatic design bears and makes meaning. Indigo, green, red, violet and blue pillars are symbolic of the five senses; the green, red, violet and blue curtains represent the four principle elements of fire, air, water and earth (6). Choreographed movement is demanded of the play’s chorus – ‘The Ten’ – a group composed of five priestesses and five priests who track, narrate and intervene in Sensa’s journey. Their bodies function as a non-naturalistic mode of story-telling and commentary. Archetypal images are conveyed through the use of frieze-like tableaux created by their movement and enhanced by unworldly stage effects conjured by the use of lighting and gauze. As this brief description suggests, Collins and Hoffman’s playtext confronts a modern reader with the need to engage with theatre texts as documents of performance events past, in this case one that was framed by its mythic, emblematic and multi-sensory narratives. In contrast to the complexity of Sensa’s theatrical content and devices, the structural frame in which Collins and Hoffman placed their stage action was familiar. The playtext is laid out in three acts, each of which is divided into two scenes. Its subject is Sensa, a young boy on the cusp of adolescence who is taken to the temple by his Mother and left there – reticent, confused and scared. At the moment she turns away from her son, the Mother drops a dim grey veil over her face and reveals herself to the audience to be non-mortal: a theatrical representation of a maternal archetype. Five minutes into the action the play steps away from staged archaeological realism and enters a world of spiritual symbolism. From the moment the veil drops the play enters a world populated and driven by ideals and forms, as Collins and Hoffman tell a coming-of-age story, tracked by the scenes’ titles: ‘the adolescent’, ‘the novice’, ‘the slave’, ‘the solitary soul’ and ‘the man’. It is likely that the story would already have been familiar to a section of the play’s audiences. Collins’s Idyll of the White Lotus had been a successful and influential spiritual tract adopted by the Theosophical Society (a group discussed in some detail below), and printed by their own London-based publishing house. By 1914 Collins had also published an interpretative companion to the work, a handbook that functioned as a guide to reading and comprehending the spiritual wisdom and instruction that it contained. Here she noted that the key to the meaning of the Idyll . . . lies in the point that Sensa, when he enters the Temple gate, enters his physical body. From that moment everything which is related takes place within himself; every person who plays a part in the drama is a personification of a quality or characteristics of his own nature. (Collins 1913: 40–1) An excerpt from the character list clearly demonstrates that Collins and Hoffman placed this didactic element at the core of their stage adaptation. Each onstage body

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represents an element of Sensa’s self; the action plays out the tensions and interactions between them: Dramatis Personae An Egyptian Peasant Woman Sensa (Her Son) The Lady of the Lotus The Dark Goddess Agmahd Kamen-Baka

Symbolism Isis or Mother Nature The Human Soul entering in to the possession of the temple, the Body, at Adolescence The Spiritual Principle in Sensa The Sensual Principle in Sensa High Priest of the Temple: Ambition High Priest of the Temple: Desire

On his entry to the temple Sensa is immediately put to work, assisting an Old Priest and his team of novices, who are fruitlessly searching the temple’s records for a spell that can cure the blindness of Lord Hesep-ti, a local ruler and important patron whom the temple community rely on for money, livestock and food. It quickly becomes clear that all is not well, and that the temple is losing its power within the town. The religious community awaits a Seer who can communicate with its Goddess, for without such a human conduit they cannot fulfil their assigned role of protecting the ruler, or convince the people of the necessity and authority of the temple and its priests. Amidst this growing anxiety, the sound of running water draws Sensa to a door at the back of the stage which leads to the temple’s garden. Ignoring the snarling warnings of the choric ‘Ten’, Sensa gains access to the garden and is led by Seboua (the resident gardener) to a water tank, where he sees ‘a fair and glorious woman’. She is The Lady of the Lotus, the embodiment of spiritual wisdom, who has not appeared to any of the temple’s priests for a generation (Collins and Hoffman 1950: 18). The vision leads to Sensa being recognised as the temple’s new Seer. The risk of rushing his subsequent journey into the main sanctuary to commune with the Dark Goddess is noted by the High Priests, Agmahd (ambition) and Kamen-Baka (desire), and immediately disregarded. Sensa is anointed, robed and seated, terrified, in a throne facing the curtained door to the inner sanctuary. The curtains are drawn back, Sensa enters a trance and sees the veiled figure of the Dark Goddess. His vision is the antithesis of his experience in the garden: he hears a cold, ice-like voice; he fears the goddess, but is drawn to her in spite of his distrust. Sensa begs for Hesep-ti to be cured of his blindness; his plea is heard, and the fortunes of the temple are turned around. This still does not satisfy Agmahd’s ambition; instead his demands and desires increase. Sensa sickens and ages as the temple community thrives. His deteriorating health prompts concern, and the ‘Ten’ are ordered to dance for him in a ritual that invokes a Dream Woman: Sensa’s Queen of Joy, an embodiment of his ‘artistic principle’. The dance is one of the most powerful theatrical moments in the playtext. A moment of darkness falls upon the stage: When it is again light, the Scene is witnessed through gauze. Sensa can be seen wakening, and with a cry of joy he perceives a beautiful woman standing beside him. . . . ‘The Ten’ continue a slow dance, over against the curtains of the Sanctuary, now singly, now in unison. The dance is composed of strange Egyptian postures, and the effect against the curtains is that of a frieze. Their movements are slow and unobtrusive, but they continue throughout the scene. (32)

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Sensa falls into the woman’s embrace and narrates what he sees and hears during his vision to the temple audience. She then disappears and Sensa returns to the present, restored. The people of the town enter the temple and he reveals the Dark Goddess to them. She begins to grant their desires, but is crushed by the number and scale of them, and disappears. A riot ensues during which The Lady of the Lotus appears to Sensa for a second time and instructs him to leave. He returns to her, recognises the greed and ambition as the result of the presence of the Dark Goddess, and begs the Lady of the Lotus for her help. She tells him to meditate and seek her, for she is always in him in the Sanctuary of his heart. He follows her instruction, and the final act of the play opens with Sensa waking from his trance-like vigil in the garden and speaking to onstage forms which represent the flowers that surround him. Prepared, he leaves the temple, ready to face the people of the town and fulfil his role as their spiritual leader.

Sensa and Theatrical Symbolism It is likely that a significant amount of the play’s content that I have laid out here will feel familiar to scholars of the fin de siècle. Sensa’s scenes, archetypal characters, meta-theatrical narration techniques and theatrical elements are reminiscent of the dreamy, veiled mysticism of Paul Fort’s Paris-based Théâtre d’Art company (1890–3) productions of Pierre Quillard’s The Girl with the Cut-Off Hands (1891) and his own Song of Songs (1891); of Georges Fragerolle’s shadow plays, produced at the Chat Noir cabaret, Montmartre, during the mid-1890s; and of the symbolist aesthetic of Aurelién Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre (1893–1929). Reaching out to the textual, visual and embodied languages of experimental symbolism offers a clear frame through which to interpret and understand the multi-sensory languages of Collins and Hoffman’s play. Patrick McGuinness has identified Quillard as one of ‘many modern avant-garde theatre thinkers’ and ‘many fellow Symbolists’ who saw ‘the future of the theatre as the winning back of its past’, and who envisioned the symbolist theatre as ‘a move backwards as much as a project in to the future’ (McGuinness 2015: 110). This past was that of myth and ur-story, and the turn to the mystical this represented not only strengthens the case for reading Sensa through a symbolist lens, but also aligns with both Collins and Hoffman’s esoteric affiliations and convictions. Collins and Hoffman were well-known members of London’s Theosophical Society – the most popular, accessible and influential of the esoteric organisations that flourished at the fin de siècle. Founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, Theosophy drew on Hindu and Buddhist texts, popularising the concepts of reincarnation and karma and attracting a large number of followers across the finde-siècle’s rapidly developing cosmopolitan Western world (see Dixon 2001; Lingan 2014). The Idyll of the White Lotus had become a key text for the movement, and remains so now. Its influence reflects the wider use and celebration of visual, literary and performing arts as expressions of, and paths to, spiritual wisdom within esoteric groups and communities. As Edmund B. Lingan has explored in detail, such organisations understood theatre and its sister arts as ways to fuse the human and the divine and to forge a path to spiritual transformation (Lingan 2014: 2), Creative practices prompted by theosophical beliefs often reveal leanings towards intellectualisation: as in the case of Sensa, artistic products frequently embedded and foregrounded the spiritual thinking behind them. Elsie Hamilton – the composer of the

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music for the 1919 production of Sensa – was also a theosophist, and the work on the ancient modes that she undertook with the archaeologist and British Museum curator of musical instruments Kathleen Schlesinger (1862–1953) was of interest to the society. In November 1917, in the middle of the First World War and between the two productions of Sensa, Hamilton and Schlesinger staged a concert at the Steinway Hall under the aegis of the Blavatsky Lodge of the Theosophical Society (Fig. 16.1). The society was also practically involved, administering ticket sales for the event. Hamilton’s compositions formed the main part of the programme, and they were accompanied by a commentary – the ‘explanatory remarks’ advertised as part of the event. The concert was concerned with performance and with spiritual learning. Music was positioned as a conduit of spiritual education and understanding. Other models of theosophical uses of performance are visible in America. Under the leadership of Katharine Tingley (1847–1929), the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society based at Point Loma, California, wove theatre into its community life and outreach practices. Restaging of ancient dramas featured heavily in the group’s theatrical activity, and Tingley built

Figure 16.1 ‘Advertisement’, Musical Times, 1 November 1917: 483.

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an outdoor theatre for this purpose at Point Loma that seated approximately two and a half thousand people. In addition she bought the San Diego Fisher Opera House, with a capacity of 1,400, and renamed it the Isis Theatre; formed an amateur theatre company, the Isis League of Music and Drama (established in 1898); and embedded performance in the educational philosophy of the Point Loma school, the Raja Yoga Academy. The society’s productions attracted mixed audiences, and positioned theatre as a complex, multimodal religious, social and political tool – a detail that supports Lingan’s argument that the close affiliation between occultism and theatre at this time was prompted both by the conviction that theatre was an ‘esoteric science that could either provide human beings with a connection to the divine, or lead them towards gnosis’, and by an understanding that theatre brought a set of practical benefits that included the enhancement of societies’ public images, increasing a sense of community or for fund raising (Lingan 2014: 7). Mark S. Morrison has convincingly argued that esoteric societies depended heavily on such exoteric public activities for their survival (Morrison 2008; see also Lingan 2014: 40). The various branches and lodges that made up the Theosophical Society operated as discrete entities, but they knew of each other’s work and key leaders travelled regularly. It is likely that Collins and Hoffman had met Tingley during her visits to London’s theosophical groups and unlikely that they would not have been aware of her use of theatre either from conversation or from articles about this work in the extensive theosophical periodical press. The expansive nature and scale of Tingley’s theatrical work far overshadow the four performances of Sensa discussed here, but the wider use of theatre as a spiritual tool in theosophical circles is important and significant in relation to Collins and Hoffman’s work. Sensa’s symbolist and esoteric contexts are undeniably strong and significant. Collins and Hoffman’s 1914 production at the Court Theatre appeared in the same year as the English translation of Wassily Kandinsky’s ‘The Art of Spiritual Harmony’. The opening response of the Saturday Review’s critic to Kandinsky’s work could stand for Sensa also. An ‘intelligent review of this book is not easy’, it began, for ‘it is vague and confusing, sincere, occult and idealistic; philosophical, psychological and dogmatic’ (Saturday Review, 14 August 1914: 202). Two months later the Court Theatre stage was to hold the first London performance of Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well, one of the Four Plays for Dancers. The Court season that preceded both Sensa and At the Hawk’s Well had included other productions that foregrounded spiritual phenomena and narratives. These included: Arthur Applin’s The Reve, a play with a cast of six characters only one of whom – a sleeping woman – is seen by the audience, with the others heard only as they play out parts of her dream visions; Bjornson’s A King, a fantastic drama that included a chorus of supernatural beings in a cloud land who featured between each of the acts; and The Sphinx, a four-act play with an apotheosis with characters including The Sensualist and A Christian Socialist.2 Taking into account Sensa’s narrative and theatrical devices and its location in a performance ecology that included Yeats, Kandinsky and the Court Theatre productions referenced above, it is tempting to place the play firmly within the avant-garde world of modernist theatrical experimentation. It clearly bears its traces, and to negate them would be foolish. However, to read the play through this one critical and aesthetic lens would considerably limit what Sensa’s complex and hidden production history might be able to tell us about theatre, politics, religion, women and theatrical production. The story conjured by the play is concerned with the conflict between the tangible and the intangible, between spiritual

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truth and worldly success, yet we should not lose sight of the tangible and successful careers of the two women who wrote the piece, and the influences that their work bore from their other professional activities in the popular fiction and theatre industries.

Thinking about the Whole: Networks, Collaborations, and Creative and Professional Range In a 2006 review article written in response to two recent books on modernity and the occult, Thomas Laqueur outlined a position of resistance against the temptation to construct a firm set of motives and sentiments for a period or generation, and then rely on those constructs as the foundations of cultural analysis. Here I would like to turn to Laqueur’s argument for its recognition of the plurality of human experience, and for his acknowledgement of the rather messier set of crossovers and intersections that are at the core of cultural life and the individual work of each creative practitioner in a given period. In relation to Sensa the crossovers incorporate spiritualism, fame, theatrical production, and the professional theatrical and literary careers of Collins and Hoffman. Sensa’s esoteric subject matter is quintessentially ‘fin de siècle’ in many ways. Its modes and practices of production and its connection with esotericism heighten this affiliation. Yet looking at the play’s production conditions and its creators reveals other drivers and ideas. One brief example can be seen in the practical and businesslike approach to theatre that the seeking of British and American copyright for the play represents, a move that speaks to the professional experiences of the women involved in its creation. Putting Collins and Hoffman, author and actress, at the centre of an understanding of this play offers a different reading of this fin-de-siècle performance, one which has stage performance, offstage performance and celebrity at its core. Collins’s model of the trefoil which she discussed in her commentary to The Idyll of the White Lotus offers a helpful way to develop this approach. The Sensa handbook opens with Collins identifying the story as one of three ‘separate, yet inseparable’ parts that are united in their very nature and essence, as are the three leaflets of the trefoil clover. ‘They cannot be taken apart’, she argues, ‘but they can be looked on separately’ (Collins 1913: 1). The trefoil was a powerful image in theosophical and esoteric philosophies. The form with its three individual parts that formed an inseparable whole was imbued with spiritual and occult meaning (Fig. 16.2). Blavatsky’s 1892 Theosophical Glossary contained an entry on the trefoil in which she defined its ‘symbolic meaning’ as ‘the three-in-one mystery’. ‘It crowned the head of Osiris, and the wreath fell off when Typhon killed the radiant god. Some see in it a phallic significance, but we deny this idea in Occultism. It was the plant of Spirit, Soul, and Life’ (Blavatsky 1892: 337). Collins’s image of the trefoil offers a useful model to explore the small network represented by Mabel Collins and Maud Hoffman (and as I later note, Florence Etlinger). Simultaneously, the trefoil’s entwined individual elements can be used as a way to explore the possible stagings and multiple understandings of Sensa that were on offer to its audiences, from the planned, large-scale, multi-sensory extravaganza that it is possible to read in the script, to the 1914 production at the Court Theatre, to the 1919 production at the Etlinger Hall, and to consider the crossovers between intimate symbolist theatre performances and commercial theatre with mystical themes.

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Figure 16.2. The trefoil. Collins and Hoffman were familiar personalities in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London. To our contemporary eyes their lifestyles stand out for their a-typicality, particularly that of Collins, who was a leading figure in the antivivisection movement, a committed vegetarian, a student of yoga practices and a well-known trance medium. Aleister Crowley labelled her ‘notorious’, and credited her ‘rather interesting writings’ with doing ‘much to make the success of the Theosophical movement’ in Britain (Skinner 1974: 130, 151). Her notoriety was largely due to her very public dispute with Blavatsky in 1889, differences which began with Collins’s expulsion from the Theosophical Society early in the year (an exclusion that appears to have been temporary) and resulted in published critiques of Blavatsky’s leadership and Collins raising libel proceedings against the society founder. This early history of Collins’s theosophical activity has been well documented, and it is not something to be overly preoccupied with here, as the lack of significant press coverage suggests that to those outside esoteric circles it was of very little consequence. Like many women involved in the Theosophical Society both Collins and Hoffman were also committed to, and actively involved in, the campaign for female suffrage. In 1908 Collins published a co-authored a suffrage novel, Outlawed, with Charlotte Despard (1844–1939), then leader of the Women’s Freedom League; Hoffman was treasurer of the Actresses’ Franchise League and appeared in the two most celebrated suffrage productions of the pre-war period: How the Vote Was Won (Cicely Hamilton, Court Theatre, 1907) and The Pageant of Great Women (Cicely Hamilton, Scala Theatre, 1909). Her image in character as Madame Roland in the latter piece was used as the frontispiece to the published text; singled out as an individual actress in role, Hoffman stood for the suffrage message of the production. Hoffman’s activism is further evidenced by her entry in the 1911 census, which marks her employment as actress and worker for the enfranchisement of women. The second is crossed through, but clearly visible. As Joy Dixon has noted, the coming together of ‘religion, especially esoteric religion, and feminist political culture’ was common (Dixon 2001: 5). Isolating these areas of Collins’s life carves out an image of an idiosyncratic fin-de-siècle celebrity that resonates with the iconography of the highly satirised figure of the New Woman:

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a public personality constructed on the type of charisma embodied by magicians or prophets, which Max Weber identified in his Sociology of Religion.3 Yet this is far from the whole story. Collins was adept at framing herself as an early mass-mediatised celebrity within a less radical set of parameters. She gave interviews about her fiction and posed for publicity shots with her adored pet dogs. She wrote fashion columns, published puffs (in-house advance publicity) for West End houses, started her own cosmetics business, attended Royal Academy Private Views, partied with Ellen Terry, Henry Arthur Jones and Charles Wyndham, and was a regular figure at West End first nights. Her fame had been garnered by her bestselling fiction; her involvement with the Theosophical Society was of less interest outside esoteric circles. Read alongside Mark S. Morrison’s argument that ‘the modernity that drove the esoteric agenda of occult experiments in subjectivity also opened exoteric doors to an occult presence in the public sphere’, the lack of attention garnered by Collins’s esoteric activities offers a useful acknowledgement of the widespread acceptance of popular iterations of occultism in day-to-day life (Morrison 2008: 3). At the end of the day, the new mauve satin gown or green dress which Mabel Collins wore to a first night appears to have been of greater public interest than her spiritual practices. Today Collins’s name remains familiar within theosophical and wider spiritual circles; her tracts continue to be used and are regularly republished. Aside from that she is the subject of one recent biography, a passing reference in many academic works on lesser-known women writers, spiritualism, the occult and theosophy, and a footnote in the lives of others, including W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, A. P. Sinnett, H. P. Blavatksy, Florence Marryat and Jack the Ripper.4 All these footnotes emphasise or are connected with her esoteric practices. However, a different story emerges if her professional status as an author of popular fiction is placed back in to the frame.

A Writer of More than Average Skill: Collins and the Sensation Press Collins published at least sixteen sensation fiction novels in a flurry of writing activity that began with An Innocent Sinner (published by Tinsley Bros. in 1877) and concluded with The Star Sapphire (published by Downey and Co. in 1896). During the same period she wrote numerous short stories and serialised longer works for the periodical press, publishing in Tinsley’s Magazine, the Women’s Penny Paper and the English Illustrated Magazine, among others. Collins’s prose style is light, and characterised by a sharp wit that transcends time. Her work was widely reviewed in journals including the Academy and the Athenaeum, and critics’ responses to it share a grudging respect for her skill as a writer, which is presented as distinct from the bestselling three-volume and later one-volume fiction formats that she worked within. It is clear that her work was not considered groundbreaking, intellectually demanding or challenging. When authoresses held their own Literary Ladies’ dinner at the Criterion Restaurant in June 1890, the Women’s Penny Paper noted that ‘few of the women of the first rank in the world of letters were present’, but that ‘diners who read periodical literature would have recognised the strengths of those who were’. Among them was Collins, ‘a novelist of no mean order’, who was selected by the gathering to respond to the Toast to Fiction. The speech she gave defended the genre of popular fiction: ‘if poetry were the higher art, novels were more popular’, she argued. ‘They had an

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enormous educational effect on great masses of people, for everyone reads novels. They widened out their readers’ sympathies and showed varied phases of human life’ (Women’s Penny Paper, 7 June 1890: 392). A position not so far removed from the esoteric belief that art could, and should, teach. Writing within the established format of sensation fiction also offered Collins an opportunity to use her interests and expertise in esoteric practices as source material. Novels, including Wilkie Collins’s (no relation) 1868 The Woman in White, have made the connection between sensation fiction and the contemporary swell of interest in spiritualism well known. Mabel Collins’s work developed this link and took it in a new direction. Her references to spiritualist ideas and practices – revealed in tales like Cobwebs (1882) and Lord Vanecourt’s Daughter (1885) – are multifarious. The esoteric content is not present simply as a shorthand for mystery, it is present as an interrogative, critical and thoughtful reflection on current discourses and debates around esotericism.5 Collins’s version of the genre perhaps reflects the eclectic nature of her writing, something I have sought to capture in Table 16.1. She was a far more prolific Table 16.1 A selection of Collins’s publications, 1877–1913 Date

Publication

Place and publisher

1877

An Innocent Sinner: A Psychological Romance

London: Tinsley Brothers

1879

Our Bohemia

London: Tinsley Brothers

1880

‘A Stolen Heart’

Short Story. Tinsley’s Magazine

1883

The Story of Helena Modjeska

London: W. H. Allen

1883

‘In the New Forest’

Short Story. English Illustrated Magazine

1884

Viola Fanshawe

London: F. V. White

1885

Light on the Path: A Treatise Written for the Personal Use of Those Who are Ignorant of the Eastern Wisdom and Who Desire to Enter Within its Influence

London: Reeves and Turner

1885

Lord Vanecourt’s Daughter

London: Ward and Down

1892

Suggestion

New York: Lovell, Gestefeld

1892

The Star Sapphire

London: Downey

1904

The Scroll of the Disembodied Man, ‘written down’ by Mabel Collins and Helen Bourchier

London: M. Watkins

1905

Illusions

London: Theosophical Publishing Society

1905

‘Death as a Psychic Experience’

Occult Review

1908

Outlawed: A Novel on the Women Suffrage Question, with Charlotte Despard

London: Henry J. Drame

1913

The Story of Sensa: An Interpretation of the Idyll of the White Lotus

London: Theosophical Publishing Society

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author than this might suggest. This selection is designed to highlight the range of her published work, demonstrate her ability to fuse styles, genres and approaches, and draw attention to the crossovers between the works, rather than to give a sense of her productivity. Her esoteric writings regularly appeared in the serialised format familiarised by the periodical press: The Transparent Jewel appeared in three monthly parts in the Occult Review between August and October 1912, and As the Flower Grows, her didactic guide to Light of the Path, was serialised in four parts between June and September 1915. The publishing houses she worked with give a sense of the range of professional contexts and networks that she operated within, alongside the journals, newspapers and magazines that she wrote reviews and columns for. Sensa, or indeed any of Collins’s writing, needs to be located and interpreted within this diverse set of wider outputs, her cultural familiarity, and her reputation as a novelist of no mean order. Alex Owen has argued that one way to think about the mystical revival of the fin de siècle ‘is to see it as a flight from the dislocations’ of the period, ‘in effect as a response to a society in crisis’; but that the identification of ‘anxiety’ and ‘disillusionment’ as the ‘mainstays’ of attempts to understand engagement with occultism at the fin de siècle leaves important ground uncovered, ‘ignores the importance of the spiritualist progressive platform and radically misunderstands the extent to which an interest in the occult was bound up with the new “social consciousness” at the end of the century’ (Owen 2004: 18). In Collins’s work for the periodical press, her sensation fiction and esoteric writings, this new social consciousness is merged with the day-to-day familiarity of esoteric ideas and activities and the leisure industries of popular fiction and theatre. The mixed material worked on different levels for different audiences, and the foundations of Sensa’s mystical theatre were built on the same ground; its content is not timeless, it is emphatically time- and personality-specific, responsive to its immediate cultural moment, and inherently connected with the professional experience and reputations of Hoffman and Collins. Mabel Collins the bestselling author is vital to an understanding of the play.

Experimental Theatrical Symbolism and the West End Commercial Theatre Industry The theatrical spectacle laid out in the playtext for Sensa is grand and ambitious. Collins and Hoffman’s stage directions refer to the presence of an orchestra pit, a clear indication that they anticipated staging the play in a large venue. The structural columns and curtaining between them that are described in the opening stage directions would have required a considerable stage area. Space would also been needed to achieve the sections of choreographed movement detailed in the text; one scene requires thirty-one characters to be moving onstage at the same time. The evidence about cast and set contained in the playtext is reminiscent of a production staged in a major West End theatre, as was the play’s visual culture and use of Egyptian iconography. Sensa’s landscape would have been familiar to London’s popular audiences. A brief consideration of J. B. Fagan’s translation of Eugene Brieux’s False Gods (La Foi), staged in 1909 at His Majesty’s Theatre by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, offers a useful comparison of the employment of a similar setting in a fashionable venue,

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populated by a celebrity cast that included Tree himself and Mrs Patrick Campbell. Correspondence relating to False Gods emphasises the focus on archaeological realism that drove the play’s creative team, but the staged action appears to have exceeded the visual, orientalist spectacle offered by the production’s temples and landscapes.6 The reviewer for the Athenaeum praised the production’s ‘pageants of a gorgeous religious ritual [and] crowds that move in picturesque costume against a background of ancient civilisation’, but also drew attention to the ways in which they ‘sway[ed] to and fro under the influence of spiritual ecstasy’ (Athenaeum, 18 September 1901: 339). The staging of religious practices drew as much response as the detailed representations of ancient Egyptian civilisation. In the West End the step between archaeological realism and spiritual and mystical performance style that we saw in Sensa also took place. Like Collins and Hoffman’s adaptation, Tree’s production could be received on multiple layers. The reviewer from the Musical Standard noted that while many audience members might choose to enjoy the play as a visual spectacle, Brieux’s drama was in many ways ‘a discussion of a great modern problem’ – the rise of agnosticism – distanced by its setting (Musical Standard, 12 September 1909: 201). Figure 16.3 captures a moment from a scene in False Gods, frozen for the sake of the photograph published by the Playgoer and Society Illustrated, which selected the production as its ‘Play of the Month’ (Morton 1909: 13). The resulting image to some extent illustrates this response, written down by the Athenaeum’s reviewer, one of the show’s thousands of spectators. False Gods’ choreographed movement and frieze-like tableaux speak to a

Figure 16.3 ‘Rheus and his Household Offering Prayers to Isis’ in False Gods, Playgoer and Society Illustrated, 1 October 1909: 13 Courtesy of University of Bristol Theatre Collection.

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similar set of ideas to those of Sensa: the worlds of the West End stage and smaller theatres were closer than one might assume. While the language and multi-sensory requirements of Sensa might conjure the dreamy world of experimental symbolism, Collins and Hoffman were working in a familiar and established set of visual and performance conventions drawn from fashionable, commercial theatre and from popular magic shows, including those of J. P. Maskelyne at the Egyptian Hall. They were not harvesting motifs from popular entertainment to use in an avant-garde space; popular entertainment was asking similar questions of the material, albeit within a different set of theatrical conventions. Dixon has reminded us that the occult revival in which Collins was engaged ‘came in many guises’. Echoing the relative lack of attention Collins’s esoteric practices attracted in the press, Dixon records the pervasiveness of occultism in leisure and entertainment. ‘Some, such as certain forms of astrology or fairground fortune telling, were relatively popular and democratic’, she notes, while others ‘like the magical Order of the Golden Dawn or the Theosophical Society itself, were more self-consciously elitist’ (Dixon 2001: 8). Yet even those self-consciously elitist organisations were accessible through other media, like theatre and music. A history of this play and of the cultural production of the fin de siècle more widely needs to consider the interactions, crossovers and collaborations between its content, forms, audiences and practitioners. Collins and Hoffman were familiar figures in London’s West End. Between them they had considerable experience of working for the commercial theatre industry in a variety of roles. Collins’s novels and short stories regularly took actresses and the world of theatre as their subject. Indeed the stage features almost as regularly as spiritualism as a theme in her fiction, and she also wrote a biography of the actress Helena Modjeska. One short story, ‘At a Big Rehearsal’, published in Tinsley’s Magazine in 1883 offers a detailed account of a backstage world. Collins frames the piece in documentary style, opening with the suggestion that she and the reader smile at the doorkeeper and persuade him they are a couple of extras in order to gain admission and watch the rehearsal. She then goes on to describe a journey through narrow, dark, bare passages, through crowds of performers, and the eventual arrival on stage ‘where the first scene is being set’ and ‘a swarm of scene-shifters and carpenters are at work with huge scenes being dragged about’ (Tinsley’s Magazine, August 1883: 127). The rest of the story continues in the same vein. The theatrical world presented is unglamorous; its performers are labourers. Reading this short story and other pieces of work in which Collins focused on the stage I find myself agreeing with the reviewer of one of her short stories about the theatre, who concluded that ‘there is evidence in the story that the author knows to some extent what she is writing about’ (Athenaeum, 1 July 1882: 11). In In the Flower of Her Youth, Collins’s autobiographical novel, the young Collins character – Lil – works as an actress, and Kim Farnell (Collins’s only biographer to date) concludes that the author was an actress in the late 1870s (although the claims are not supported by evidence) (Farnell 2005).7 I have been unable to find any record of Collins performing under her real name, but it is of course very possible that she worked under a stage name. Her later work writing puffs for West End theatres indicates that she had a strong network in the industry, which may have been instigated by an earlier career in performance. Ultimately what is clear is that Collins had experience and detailed working knowledge of theatrical production. What also becomes clear is that this did not help her in her attempts to write for the stage.

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Collins had written three plays before the production of Sensa. These varied in form and content, but were all staged as one-off matinee performances rather than programmed in a theatre’s main repertoire. Staging matinees of new writing was common practice in West End playhouses.8 Collins’s first play was Suggestion, written with theatre manager W. Heron Brown, which had one performance at the Lyric Theatre in November 1891. It was an adaptation of a Collins novel that appeared the following year. The play follows a familiar melodramatic narrative – echoing the synergies between sensation fiction and stage melodrama. There are two sons: one a hero in love with the heroine, the other a gambling, murderous hypnotist who places the heroine in a trance and persuades her to poison his brother/her future husband. The hero is saved by the timely sudden death of the villain. Collins’s second staged play, A Modern Hypatia: A Drama of Today, had a copyright performance at the Bijou Theatre, Bayswater, in February 1894. It was revived for a Monday matinee at Terry’s in June 1895. Hypatia was a well-known figure on the stage at the time. The previous year had seen the leading West End actress Julia Neilson play the lead in G. Stuart Olgivie’s adaptation of Charles Kingsley’s 1853 novel Hypatia, or New Foes with Old Faces in a run of 104 performances. Collins injected the play with her gender politics, and her take on the Hypatia myth was not well received.9 The Athenaeum described it as one of ‘two new and singularly unpleasant pieces on the programme’ (22 June 1895: 816). The Theatre acknowledged that the author’s identity was no secret, but that it had been wise of her to produce the play anonymously (July 1895: 47). It was widely reviewed, though, and had received some pre-publicity in the Era (8 June 1895: 10) and Morning Post (10 June 1896: 10). Next came a stage adaptation of Outlawed, the 1908 novel she had co-authored with Charlotte Despard. The stage version was co-written with Alice Chapin, an American actress, producer and dramatist, and an Actresses’ Franchise League member. It was performed in November 1911 at the Court Theatre with Chapin producing and performing in the piece. The Times dismissed it as ‘inspired by penny novelettes and puffed into a pretence of importance by the wind of female suffragism’ (24 November 1911: 11). The Athenaeum found the writers ‘amateurs at play construction’, the mistaken identity plot ‘preposterous’ and the narrative ‘grotesquely sensational’ (25 November 1911: 672). Neither writing for the stage nor artistic collaboration was new for Collins when she turned to adapting The Idyll of the White Lotus, but her theatrical work had not, to date, met with a positive reception. Like Collins, Maud Hoffman has not stood the celebrity ‘test of time’ (Plate 11). Historical and popular understandings of the personalities of a period are regularly shaped by the stars that remain familiar; the images and icons that linger as a result of the canonisation of their work, the continuing appeal of their style or their intriguing biographies. Other celebrities disappear; what were household names drop out of history. In her day Maud Hoffman was selected to appear as one of the fifty-two theatrical personalities in Celebrities of the Stage, a sixteen-part periodical series published in 1900, with each issue including full-page colour portraits and page-length biographies of its featured stars (Boyle 1900). She started her successful stage career in America with E. S. Willard’s company, relocated to London in 1898, and then worked steadily in the West End and the provinces, appearing in sizeable or leading roles at the Lyric, Drury Lane, Terry’s, Wyndham’s, St James’s, Haymarket, Adelphi, Playhouse and Royalty theatres in the West End (Parker 1909: 253). Her image was reproduced for postcards, and interviews with her appeared in the press.

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Autographed pictures turn up regularly in sales of theatrical ephemera from the period, indicating her desirability and following. Like Collins, Hoffman fits in to that second band of well-known leading ladies in her profession; not A-list but well known and professionally respected, she was more akin to Maud Tree than to Ellen Terry or Sarah Bernhardt. Publicity photographs clearly demonstrate how she adopted and used established celebrity techniques from the period to frame her public identity. Extant evidence suggests that the most widely reproduced and collected image was of Hoffman depicted in her study; a staging of celebrity self that presented the actress as intellectual and that was opted for by many stage performers of the period. Hoffman was also closely connected with the Theosophical Society. In 1911 she appeared in Married by Degrees at the Court Theatre, a play written by Alfred Sinnett, vice president of the Society. Hoffman played the lead character, Lucy/Leonora, a woman suffering from a dual personality disorder who was cured by a Professor of Hypnotism. ‘One of those weird little plays in which a psychological problem is interwoven with a series of very ordinary and practical circumstances’, concluded the reviewer from the Playgoer and Society Illustrated (5. 35 (October 1911): 28). On his death in 1921 Sinett left Hoffman a considerable amount in his will, along with all his manuscripts and copyrights, including the Mahatma letters which she published in 1923. The following year she was living in France, as part of Gurdjieff’s Fontainebleau community of followers.10 Like Collins, Hoffman is now a footnote in the history of others, the subject of these footnotes being predominantly these 1920s events. Understanding her celebrity, however, brings into focus a different view both of the production of Sensa (which I suspect she performed in, but cannot evidence) and of her public connection with the Theosophical Society. The patronage of London’s celebrated and beautiful actresses is an element of the Society’s exoteric activity, publicity and outreach work that has, to date, been under-considered.

Theatrical Networks: The Florence Etlinger Theatre School The 1914 and 1919 productions of Sensa took place in two very different locations connected with the popular stage. The Court Theatre had a capacity of 841 at this point in its history; the auditorium was considerably larger than in the current venue (the Royal Court, Sloane Square). Hoffman had performed there many times, and Collins had produced Outlawed there in 1911. The stage was large, but a one-off copyright performance would not have had a full set. Both the financial outlay and the rapid ‘get in and get out’ of the production would have made a full set impossible. Brieux’s (the writer of False Gods) play Damaged Goods was staged the night after the matinee of Outlawed. The Court was also a hub for many of the fin de siècle’s play-producing societies, including the Society of Play Actors and the Authors’ Producing Society, a group established earlier in the same year that had produced a well-received season at the Court. Plays were staged quickly, without full set and often, accounts suggest, without full blocking and movement. The critic from the Academy who reviewed The One Thing Needful earlier in April at the Court noted that ‘like most three-act plays produced for a single matinee’ it did not ‘run with the smoothness and bravery of an elaborate production’, particularly in relation to scenery and movement (4 April 1914:

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438). It is clear that Collins and Hoffman’s ambitious stage directions could not have been followed at the Court in 1914. The 1919 performances of Sensa took place in the Etlinger Hall – the auditorium of the Florence Etlinger Theatre School.11 In their review of another production staged at the school in 1919, The Stage (2 July 1919: 12) described the performance space in the venue as ‘small’. The chances that the pillars and curtains Collins and Hoffman so precisely and imaginatively created were accommodated in this space are minimal. On both occasions significant compromises must have been made to the play’s set and action in response to practical demands and limitations. Etlinger’s involvement is significant on other levels, however. Educated at Oxford and a Paris music school, Etlinger had established her institution at 60 Paddington Street in 1912 after working as a successful professional singer and singing teacher at several other general and musical schools (‘Obituary’, Musical News and Herald, 62 (1922): 118). The school ran on a subscription model. Subscribers were charged a guinea a year, in return for access to regular private student performances, rehearsals and lessons.12 The establishment quickly gained a good reputation and attracted patrons, including Oscar Asche, Martin Harvey, Robert Courtneidge and Ellaline Terris.13 In 1913 Etlinger took her pupils to the Court Theatre to stage a one-off performance of Rousseau’s Devin du Village to mark his bicentenary – further testament to the respect that the school was held in by the wider theatre industry. Simultaneously, Etlinger’s pedagogy had a political edge. She was an active member of the Girls’ School Music Union and her educational philosophy and agenda challenged the status quo of the stage. In an interview given in the first year of the school’s history she stated: Yes, I think my school is a qualified success, although at present it is not a flourishing financial proposition, but the fees I ask for general instruction are very small, and many of the girls I train in order to be able to let them have a chance to secure paying managements. It is very difficult, however, for young women to get a satisfactory hearing from London managers. They are chosen, as a rule, in regard to their appearance. If they are pretty in face and figure, it really matters very little whether they can dance, act or sing. This is the cause, in my opinion, of London chorus girls being generally regarded as mechanical and amateurish, although they are generally famous for their beauty. (Musical Standard, 7 December 1912: 388) Etlinger was also connected with the Theosophical Society, although to date it has proved impossible to prove whether she was a member.14 Gender, politics and professional theatrical culture were at the core of Etlinger’s business, and her affiliation to Collins and Hoffman, and the collective impact of their industry-based activities and activism, resonate in all three of these areas.

‘This drama is a story which has been told in all ages’ Sensa appears to be the only spiritualist play Mabel Collins was involved in. Her published description of her play, as a timeless dramatic narrative ‘told in all ages, and among every people’, entwines the text with the symbolist and esoteric use of the

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visual and performing arts to express and communicate spiritual messages. Simultaneously, the writing and the two productions of Sensa, and its content, were products of their immediate moment; time-specific events that drew on knowledge of the venues and theatrical culture in which they were staged. The staging of this play – as with the production of any play – was the result of a particular social, cultural and political moment. The spectacle it embedded was integrally connected to London’s popular theatre industry, its familiar esoteric leisure activities, the popular mysticism of music hall and magic shows, the periodical press and fiction publishing industry, and to celebrity. Simultaneously it filtered the symbolist theatre aesthetic that developed at the turn of the century across Europe. The limitations and practices of the venues that it was staged in make it clear that the play in production could not have fulfilled the ambition of the playtext, yet the production history of this play and the professional lives and networks of its creators raise important questions about theatrical production, spirituality, embodiment and creative practices that are of interest to an understanding of the fin de siècle. Theatrical production is always a collective and collaborative endeavour. It requires the coming together of creative vision, practical demands, diverse skill sets and willing spectators. It is a dialectical process of desire and compromise, a live exchange between bodies and minds in space and time. Like the image of the trefoil, each part of this endeavour can be considered separately, but it will always remain part of the whole. Acknowledging the exoteric role of the esoteric in Sensa’s cultural contexts, and locating the play in the wider professional and leisure contexts from which it emerged, in part resituates the seemingly symbolist drama in a moment when its content and ideas could be read on multiple levels. Celebrity, the West End stage, popular fiction, occultism and the symbolist aesthetic were woven into one cultural product in Sensa, indicating that to understand the landscape of performance and esotericism at this time we should let the event and its contents lead and should acknowledge and embrace the multiple connections, intersections and overlaps that were at the core of theatrical production. To force divides within the contents of this play, to seek to identify elements of Sensa as popular, or experimental, or intellectual, would be to tear apart the whole for the sake of possessing the individual leaf, and to occlude significant evidence about cultural production at the fin de siècle. In a wider context this approach also demands the consideration of the lesser-known, or unknown, moments of literature and theatre in order to comprehend the scope of the artistic landscape and its drivers and synergies; it argues for the redirection of our attention from a (re)consideration of the period’s established figures, to making the subjects of the footnotes our point of focus.

Notes 1. See also the Arts Gazette, 1, 1919: 374; and the Athenaeum, 2, 1919: 564. 2. Royal Court Theatre file, Mander & Mitchenson Collection, University of Bristol Theatre Collection; and Daily Mail, 21 February 1914: 3, and 9 March 1914: 4. 3. The essays in Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (2013) draw on Bergson’s thinking about charisma, and have influenced my thinking here. 4. With regard to the connection with Jack the Ripper, this concerned rumours about a love triangle between Collins, Victoria Cremers (a fellow theosophist) and Rosyln D’Onston

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

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(Robert D’Onston Stephenson), a writer, journalist and Jack the Ripper suspect with whom Collins and Cremers shared lodgings. Lord Vanecourt’s Daughter (1885) features a military adept who is the hero’s guardian angel and protects him against villainy. Cobwebs (1882) is a collection of short stories; the third of them is an exposé of fraudulent spiritualist mediumship. Correspondence and Business Papers relating to False Gods. Herbert Beerbohm Tree archive, University of Bristol Theatre Collection. This information also came from an email conversation with Farnell. All three plays are in the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection, British Library. See the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection. Hoffman wrote about her experiences at the Gurdjieff Institute for the New York Times in February 1924. The space occupied by the School is visible on the 1894 and 1921 Ordinance Survey maps of the Paddington area; the later map reveals that walls were knocked through to create a large space. The chapel next door to this space records a capacity of 400. Comparing the two buildings, to scale, makes it clear that any auditorium inside the Etlinger Hall could not have had a capacity over 500. With thanks to Alison Kenney, Westminster City Archives. Florence Etlinger Repertory Theatre, Operatic and Dramatic School programmes, Royal College of Music Archives. I would like to thank Michael Mullen of the RCM for his help with obtaining copies of these items. Programmes, ‘Etlinger School’ folder, Mander & Mitchenson Collection, University of Bristol Theatre Collection. Hoffman is recorded as being present at a meeting on ‘Social Reconstruction in the Light of Theosophy’ at Toynbee Hall in 1912. Annual Report of the Universities’ Settlement in East London, https://archive.org/details/annualreportuni00englgoog

Works Cited Berenson, E. and E. Giloi (eds) (2013), Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Blavatsky, H. P. (1892), The Theosophical Glossary, London: Theosophical Publishing Society. Boyle, L. (ed.) (1900), Celebrities of the Stage, London: George Newnes. Collins, M. (1913), The Story of Sensa: An Interpretation of the Idyll of the White Lotus, London: Theosophical Publishing Society. [Collins, M.] M. C., A Fellow of the Theosophical Society (1884), The Idyll of the White Lotus, London: Reeves and Turner. Collins, M. and M. Hoffman (1950), Sensa: A Mystery Play in Three Acts, adapted from The Idyll of the White Lotus, Covina: Theosophical University Press. Dixon, J. (2001), Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Farnell, K. (2005), Mystical Vampire: The Life and Work of Mabel Collins, Oxford: Mandrake. Laqueur, T. (2006), ‘Why the Margins Matter: Occultism and the Making of Modernity’, Modern Intellectual History, 3. 1: 111–35. Lingan, E. (2014), The Theatre of the Occult Revival: Alternative Spiritual Performance from 1875 to the Present, London: Palgrave Macmillan. McGuinness, P. (2015), Poetry and Radical Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France: From Anarchism to Action Française, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morrison, M. S. (2008), ‘The Periodical Culture of the Occult Revival: Esoteric Wisdom, Modernity and Counter-Public Spheres’, Journal of Modern Literature, 31. 2: 1–22.

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Morton, E. (1909), ‘False Gods at His Majesty’s Theatre’, Playgoer and Society Illustrated, 1. 1: 9–27. Owen, A. (2004), The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, Berkeley: University of California Press. Parker, J. (ed.) (1909), The Green Room Book, or Who’s Who on the Stage, London: T. Sealey Clark. Skinner, S. (ed.) (1974), Aleister Crowley’s Astrology, With a Study of Neptune and Uranus, Jersey: Neville Spearman.

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17 Intergenerational Collaboration and Conflict: Women’s Periodicals at the Fin de Siècle Alexis Easley

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n 1908, members of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League marched through London carrying banners dedicated to women writers of the past, including Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Park 2000: 93). Among those in the procession were Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner and May Sinclair – writers of a new generation keen on demonstrating their indebtedness to the achievements of their literary foremothers. Such an image of intergenerational solidarity to some extent defines the field of Victorian women’s studies in our own time. In our research and in the classroom, we often emphasise the sense of continuity in women’s history – how writers like Harriet Martineau and Margaret Oliphant made it possible for writers like Amy Levy and Virginia Woolf to pursue their art, enter the literary marketplace and find a receptive audience. Histories of the women’s movement likewise often emphasise a sense of feminine solidarity at the fin de siècle. Susan Faludi, for example, recently imagined first-wave feminism as a ‘maternal campaign centered around an increasingly radical desire for mothers to arm their daughters, both literally and figuratively, against male control, especially male sexual control’ (2010: 35–6). Indeed, a sense of intergenerational collaboration was demonstrated not only in the late Victorian women’s movement but also in the many tributes to Victorian foremothers published in women’s and girls’ periodicals of the fin de siècle, which reimagined women of an earlier age as models for a younger generation.1 Yet just as today there is what Faludi calls a ‘mother-daughter divide’ among second- and third-wave feminists, there was also an ideological divide between younger and older generations of women at the fin de siècle (Faludi 2010: 29).2 The ‘advanced’ young woman often positioned herself in opposition to the ‘old woman’, who was imagined as a fossilised vestige of the past. Many women’s magazines of the 1890s likewise relied on the figure of the ‘advanced’ young woman to seize the interest of a new generation of women readers at the fin de siècle – those who had come of age after the ratification of the 1870 Education Act, the repeal of the taxes on knowledge, and the consequent proliferation of mass-market periodicals. The association of the ‘advanced’ woman with youth, beauty and novelty reflected broader developments in mass media, which emphasised newness and the worship of celebrity. The emergence of the new woman in 1894 – as a media creation and social identity – followed two decades of media obsession with (and construction of) conflict between generations of women: the ‘advanced’ young

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woman and the ‘old lady’. This development was inseparable from the emergence of the New Journalism during the same period, which sensationalised women’s youthful bodies and subjectivities and similarly constructed the ‘old woman’ as the new woman’s sensationalised other. In this chapter, I will examine representations of the ‘new generation’ in women’s periodicals of the fin de siècle, demonstrating how they were positioned in relation to writers and activists of the past – women who alternatively served as inspirational muses and judgemental antagonists. These representations mark very real differences in women’s experiences at the fin de siècle. After all, women entering the literary field in the 1890s faced a different set of circumstances from those of writers of their mothers’ or grandmothers’ generation. As William Strauss and Neil Howe put it, ‘since history affects people very differently according to their age, common age location is what gives each cohort-group a distinct biography and a distinct lifecycle’ (1991: 48). In the first part of this chapter, I examine these differing circumstances, demonstrating how they produced both continuity and discord between generations of women beginning in the late 1860s. I will then turn my focus to the 1890s, when the idea of intergenerational collaboration and conflict became an important keynote of first-wave feminism and its associated periodicals. In these contexts, the idea of ‘generations’ was a media construct used to authorise fin-de-siècle feminism. Focusing on Shafts (1892–9) and the Suffragette (1912–15), I demonstrate how younger and older generations of women were represented as being united against the conservative ‘old lady’ in their pursuit of the feminist cause. The idea of intergenerational solidarity was adapted in advertisements published in feminist periodicals, which recast the ‘advanced’ young woman and her progressive mother as the consumers of new fashions and cosmetic preparations. The idea of intergenerational collaboration thus served both political and commercial ends. In the next part of this chapter, I turn to an upmarket women’s periodical – the Lady’s Realm (1896–1915) – in order to examine how the idea of intergenerational collaboration and conflict between women was carried over into mainstream commercial journalism. My analysis in this section demonstrates affinities between feminist periodicals and more general-interest titles directed at ‘advanced’ women of the upper classes. The Lady’s Realm, like its more explicitly feminist counterparts, was embedded in a commercial publishing industry in which there was often slippage between ‘new’ commercial products and ‘new’ women consumers. Likewise, it relied on the celebrity worship and sensationalism associated with the New Journalism to claim a share of an increasingly crowded journalistic marketplace. Disconnected from any unifying feminist cause, it gave voice to conservative perspectives, putting them into conversation with more progressive points of view. While it subtly endorsed feminist ideals, it nevertheless relied on controversy over the ‘new girl’ and the new woman to spark reader interest. Taken together, the Lady’s Realm and its feminist counterparts demonstrate the potency of intergenerational collaboration and conflict as political and commercial strategies in women’s mass media at the fin de siècle. Women writers participated in the discourse on generations in multiple ways: as writers, readers and consumers. As I will demonstrate, their positionality within debates over women’s rights was inseparable from the changing conventions of print media, which determined the kinds of subjectivities they could assume in the literary marketplace.

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Generations of Women Writers: 1850–1900 After the repeal of the duties on print (1853–61), the number of women’s periodicals expanded dramatically. This included the first mass-market titles dedicated to women, such as the Queen (1861–1967) and the English Woman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–79). It also included the first pressure-group periodicals focused on advancing women’s rights: the English Woman’s Journal (1858–64) and Victoria Magazine (1863–80). These periodicals published frequent biographical profiles of women writers and activists of the past which simultaneously served to authorise women’s collective identity and to define them as a profitable niche market in popular print culture. The Young Englishwoman (1864–94), for example, was designed to appeal to the generation of young women that had come of age after the repeal of the taxes on print, yet it regularly published retrospective articles that highlighted the accomplishments of women of an earlier generation in its ‘Notable Living Women and Their Deeds’ series. While Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) is praised for her domestic virtues (thus supporting other conventionally ‘feminine’ content in the magazine), she is also held up as a model of one who achieved professional ‘victory at the price of a long and painful struggle against misrepresentation, apathy, ignorance, and even ridicule’ (Anon. 1875b: 88). George Sand (1804–76) is admonished for her scandalous lifestyle but is also praised for producing novels that ‘enriched the world’ (Anon. 1875c: 375). While the series as a whole constructed literary foremothers as models for the younger generation, it also subtly highlighted differences between women of the past and the ‘young Englishwoman’ identified in the magazine’s title. The profile of poet Eliza Cook (1812–89), for example, notes that in the past she ‘pushed her way into the front ranks of female talent’ but that her ‘poetic powers’ had ‘rusted’ with time (Anon. 1875a: 618). Notable women of the past were intended to demonstrate how young women readers might defy convention without violating domestic codes of behaviour. At the same time, they served as ‘trusted’ identities that must be replaced with newer, more modern models of subjectivity – a modernity that was increasingly linked to the consumption of commodities. The subtitle of the magazine – ‘a volume of pure literature, new fashions, and pretty needlework designs’ – suggested the importance of a steady supply of ‘new’ literary and commercial goods in the construction of the mass-market female reader. The idea of the ‘new’ woman reader in the 1860s and 1870s corresponded to the idea of the ‘new’ woman writer. When entering the literary field, mid-century women authors encountered a very different set of editorial conventions and writing opportunities from those of authors such as Nightingale, Sand and Cook. Before 1860, most periodicals and newspapers ascribed to a policy of anonymous publication which enabled a large number of middle-class women to contribute to the press without losing social respectability. Hidden behind the ‘editorial we’, they were able write on topics conventionally associated with male authorship: for example, on politics, economics and social policy. They could also contribute to debates over women’s employment and educational opportunity, what came to be known as the ‘Woman Question’. Women writers entering the literary marketplace in the 1850s – Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), for example, or Christina Rossetti (1830–94) – encountered unprecedented opportunities to publish their work in the periodical press. And some, like Braddon and Rossetti, were able to use this journalistic experience as a springboard for high-profile careers as authors of book publications.

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After 1860, print media became increasingly focused on celebrity authorship. This trend was in part due to the movement away from a policy of anonymous publication in literary magazines and reviews. In 1859, Macmillan’s Magazine began publicising the names of its contributors, and many other shilling monthlies soon followed. Because middle-class women were an increasingly important market for literary periodicals, editors were keen on promoting women contributors. Even though women had been contributing to the periodical press for years, their visibility within popular print culture was in a sense ‘news’ – a sign of the times. The ‘new’ woman writer was of course also the subject of significant controversy. The modern, ‘visible’ woman inevitably came into conflict with women writers of an earlier generation. This divide, I suggest, was just as much a consequence of real generational differences between women as it was a result of changes in print culture, which altered the forms of subjectivity women could assume. It is within this era of rapid change that the idea of intergenerational conflict between women became a media obsession – as epitomised by Eliza Lynn Linton’s infamous essay ‘The Girl of the Period’ (1868) (also discussed in this volume by Jad Adams). This article attacked the habits of the modern young woman, calling her a ‘loud and rampant modernisation, with her false red hair and painted skin’ who speaks ‘slang as glibly as a man’ (Linton 1868: 340). Originally published anonymously in the Saturday Review, ‘The Girl of the Period’ reflected the magazine’s conservative politics, especially on the Woman Question (Anderson 1987: 119, 120). The issue in which the essay appeared was immediately a bestseller, and a number of rejoinders soon followed, some praising the essay, some denouncing its backward attitudes towards women (Anderson 1987: 122–4, 131–3). Because the essay was successful in seizing public attention, the Saturday Review commissioned Linton to write several more anonymous essays in the same vein over the next decade. In fact, as Clement Scott later noted, the series was the result of the Saturday Review’s deliberate strategy ‘to set woman against woman, and to see who would make the best fight of it’ (1899: I.422). Linton was in many ways a likely candidate for fomenting intergenerational conflict. By the time ‘The Girl of the Period’ was published in the Saturday Review, she was a seasoned, respected journalist who had made good use of the convention of anonymity in the periodical press, writing prolifically for the Morning Chronicle and a host of other periodicals. By satirising the ‘girl of the period’, she was criticising women’s increased visibility in print culture at the same time that she was stimulating fresh interest in the ‘new girl’ stereotype in the mass media. Hidden behind the ‘editorial we’, she was shielded from personal notoriety. Yet the Saturday Review’s adherence to anonymous publication was at odds with broader changes in print culture, which emphasised the celebrity identities of contributors and increasingly incorporated images of women into illustrations and advertisements. It was just a matter of time before Linton would be ‘outed’ as the author of ‘The Girl of the Period’. Indeed, Tomahawk published a caricature of an anti-feminist ‘old woman’ in its April 1868 issue, depicting her as an ugly old lady who spews venom against a beautiful ‘girl of the period’ (Fig. 17.1). This image, I argue, illustrates the problems faced by women of the older generation who relied on anonymity to forge careers in the popular press – who were made into spectacles within an increasingly visual print culture that pitted older women against the young. The image of the old woman alludes to Linton’s bespectacled appearance even as it withholds her name. But beyond just subjecting

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Figure 17.1 Matt Morgan, ‘“The girl of the period!” Or, Painted by a Prurient Prude’, Tomahawk, 4 April 1868: 139. Linton to a visual culture that defined her as a caustic old prude, the caricature set up an opposition between ‘old’ and ‘new’ women that would resonate throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century. Such an image suggests that the old woman creates the new, yet it also relies on the notion of intergenerational conflict to spark laughter and sell magazine issues. If beauty sells, then so does the disjunction between beauty and ugliness. The ‘girl of the period’ controversy continued well into the 1890s, with Linton ultimately serving as the ‘face’ of the anti-feminist movement and the ‘girl of the period’ eventually morphing into the new woman.3 By the fin de siècle, images of female writers and other celebrities were ubiquitous in print culture. Portraits of actresses and society beauties, along with images of women authors at home, became a staple of celebrity periodicals such as the Sketch (1893–1959) and Windsor Magazine (1895–1939). Images of women were also often featured in advertisements selling a diverse array of products, from corsets to patent medicines. The proliferation of images of women was enabled by new production technologies, such as the photographic halftone, which opened up powerful new means of representation. ‘The magazine quickly became an essential link between the production of commodities

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and events and their consumption’, Gerry Beegan notes, and within this matrix, women were defined both as consumers of domestic goods and as pretty faces used to sell commodities (2008: 17). This was especially true of the large number of women’s periodicals founded at the fin de siècle, which capitalised on increases in women’s literacy and purchasing power.4 This included mass-market penny domestic magazines such as Home Chat (1895–1958) and Home Notes (1894–1957), as well as more upmarket titles, such as Woman’s World (1887–90) and the Lady’s Realm (1896–1915). Young women were an important audience for periodical literature, as can be seen from the founding of several girls’ periodicals at the fin de siècle, notably Atalanta (1887–98) and the Girl’s Own Paper (1880–1956). According to Kirsten Drotner, about 20 per cent of all girls’ periodicals published before 1970 were founded between 1880 and 1918 (1988: 123). During this time period, a number of explicitly feminist periodicals were also founded, including Shafts (1892–9), the Woman’s Signal (1894–9) and the Suffragette (1912–15), among a host of other progressive titles. There was a great deal of crossover between ‘advanced’ women’s periodicals, girls’ magazines and feminist newspapers published at the fin de siècle. All participated in the construction of the new woman and the ‘new girl’ as exemplars of a new generation and as controversial novelties that could be used to sell periodicals and commercial goods. In political and commercial contexts, the new was often positioned in opposition to the old – old women, old products and old conventionalities – as a motivating force for action. This emphasis on novelty coincided with the emergence of the New Journalism, which emphasised sensationalism, personality and mass-market appeal.5 The new ‘personal’ style of journalism provided opportunities for women to publish celebrity interviews, fashion reports, sensational exposés and myriad other genres of massmarket journalism. Thus, women writers who entered the literary field at the fin de siècle – Amy Levy (1861–89), for example, or Mary Cholmondeley (1859–1925) – found themselves in a literary marketplace that offered unprecedented opportunities for working as professional writers. They had greater access to elementary and higher education than their mothers and grandmothers, and they were able to participate in professional organisations such as the Society of Authors, the Institute of Journalists and the Society of Women Journalists, founded in 1884, 1890 and 1894, respectively. Women’s literary clubs also emerged as important sites for professional self-help in the final decades of the century, and women could make use of employment manuals such as Arnold Bennett’s Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide (1898) and Frances Low’s Press Work for Women (1904).6 Still, women writers entering the literary field in the 1890s found themselves in a literary marketplace that was viewed as ‘feminine’ and therefore less valuable than the high-culture realms of literary production dominated by men. As Andreas Huyssen has observed, ‘[t]his universalizing ascription of femininity to mass culture always depended on the very real exclusion of women from high culture and its institutions’ (1986: 62).7 The new mass media was deemed ‘feminine’ in part because visual representations of young, beautiful women were so ubiquitous in print culture at the fin de siècle. Popular illustrated periodicals founded in the 1890s, such as the Sketch, frequently published portraits of beautiful women on their covers, using these images to seize attention on an increasingly crowded newsstand (Fig. 17.2). Likewise, the Strand Magazine (1891–1950) frequently published articles with titles such as ‘Celebrated

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Figure 17.2 Cover, Sketch, 19 August 1908: 812.

Beauties’ and ‘Types of English Beauty’, thus capitalising on increased interest in celebrity culture. For women writers of the older generation, such an emphasis on beauty and celebrity violated the conventions of the system in which they had forged their careers – where anonymous publication was the rule and women did not have to present themselves to public view. Like Linton, they were forced to assume visible public identities. The Strand’s ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives’ series, for example, represented the careers of older women writers as a series of time-stamped portraits. In November 1891, novelist Charlotte Yonge (1823–1901) was featured in four images depicting her progression from age twenty-one to sixtyeight (Fig. 17.3). The accompanying description mentions two of her novels, Abbeychurch (1844) and The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), which were written when she was in

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Figure 17.3 ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives: Miss Charlotte Yonge’, Strand Magazine, November 1891: 479. her twenties and thirties. Her ageing is thus associated with the notion that her best days are behind her, even if she is ‘at present editor of The Monthly Packet’ (Strand, November 1891: 479). Two years later, she was removed from this editorial position. As Susan Walton puts it, the publisher of the magazine ‘believed that Yonge, aged seventy, had become a liability’ (2016: 292). Christabel Coleridge explained that ‘the old public was growing older’ and that an editor ‘more in touch with young girls’ was needed to revive the magazine (1903: 278). To be an ‘old’ writer was to be redundant in a visual culture focused on novelty and beauty. Indeed, just one issue after Yonge’s ‘decline’ was featured in the ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives’ series, American actress Mary Anderson was featured in a series of portraits highlighting her unchanging beauty (Fig. 17.4) (Strand, December 1891: 601).

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Figure 17.4 ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives: Miss Mary Anderson’, Strand Magazine, December 1891: 601.

‘What the Girl Says’: Shafts and the Suffragette While in the mainstream illustrated press of the 1890s older woman writers were often depicted as relics of the past, in the feminist press of the same time period the ‘old’ woman was typically depicted as an anti-feminist antagonist whose backward attitudes threatened a youthful movement. This trope is frequently deployed in Shafts, a feminist weekly founded and edited by Margaret Shurmer Sibthorp.8 The paper’s cover features the image of a beautiful woman who is meant express the feminist movement’s youthful idealism (Fig. 17.5).9 An explanatory editorial states, ‘There is injustice and want of truth still, but, as the clouds disappear before the rays of the morning sun, so must ignorance and injustice, falsehood and evil, vanish before the spirit of this great and glorious age’ (Shafts, 12 November 1892: 28). Meanwhile, the ‘old lady’ is imagined saying ‘with a sigh: “Ah! girls are not what they were when I was young! People don’t know how to bring up their children nowadays” ’ (28). Rather than looking to the past, the editorial notes, the new generation must live in the

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Figure 17.5 Cover, Shafts, 3 November 1892. © British Library. present and look toward ‘a still greater and still more glorious future’ (28). A month later, a profile of a particular ‘old lady’, Eliza Lynn Linton, accuses her of ‘crushing all spirit of independence in women, and blackening those who want to be useful in their generation’ (French 1892: 68). The youthfulness of the feminist movement is reinforced in a regular column titled ‘What the Girl Says’, which voices the reflections of a forward-looking generation. The title of the series was derived from What the Boy Thought (1884), by James Stanley Little, which offered a young man’s humorous reflections on the adult world. In response, Shafts asserts its aim: Here and there the souls that strive have gathered, listening; dimly guessing that the girl also has thought; the air has been filled with their questioning. . . . Why has she been silent – has she been gagged? Has no one chronicled her thoughts – is there no record? Yea, one there is who knows well what the girl has thought; and will tell it, from its vaguest murmurs to its fullest tones – It is the girl herself. Listen! (Anon. 1892e) The heading of the column offers an invitation to girls to contribute, and in subsequent instalments, it publishes their submissions without identifying information, presenting them as the views of a collective ‘Girl’:

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The Girl says, she always thought God was a man, because everything written in the Bible thinks of men first. . . . The Girl says, boys and men have thought so long that everything was made for them that they have quite forgotten how to teach themselves the selflessness that makes people strong. . . . The Girl says, girls and women have had to fight their way step by step, they have suffered and grown strong; soon this will make such a change in the world. The Girl says, she thought the cage of the House of Commons was where the members kept their pet birds, and wondered how they could be so cruel, until she saw the pet birds hopping up there of their own accord, then she wondered more. (Anon 1892e) The contributions to ‘What the Girl Says’ are consistently feminist in their point of view, suggesting that they might actually have been written by Sibthorp – or at the very least that they were carefully selected and edited to support the paper’s overall mission. However, the specificity of some contributions suggests that they might have come from actual readers. One girl, for example, is referred to by her pseudonym ‘Fabianne’ in an editorial footnote, and another, a ‘Board-school Girl’, makes specific reference to her brothers Jack and Teddy, who receive the kind of schooling that is out of reach to her due to her sex (Anon. 1892g; 1892h). In this sense, Shafts participated in constructing the figure Sally Mitchell calls the ‘new girl’, who ‘moved into spheres where her mother had no advice to give . . . did things her mother had not done and faced issues her mother did not face – if not in reality, at least in fancy’ (1995: 9). The ‘ascription of immaturity and transition’ to the ‘new girl’, Mitchell notes, allowed her ‘to behave in ways that might not be appropriate for a woman’ (25). Yet in Shafts, as in many other feminist periodicals, the idea of intergenerational collaboration was crucial in the formation of first-wave feminist identity. The ‘new girl’ is depicted as relying on her mother for support and inspiration. In one instalment of ‘What the Girl Says’, the Girl asserts that the ‘change in the position of women, her mother tells her, is the beginning of a wonderful revolution, the greatest the world has ever known’ (Anon. 1893).10 In other instances, the mother figure appears as an exhausted, beleaguered martyr who is ‘working when she gets up in the morning; [and] when she goes to bed at night’ (Anon. 1892f). Indeed, ‘When the Girl looks at her mother then she feels something squeezing up her heart, and she has to run away and cry. She wonders if her father ever cries when he sees her mother so tired’ (Anon. 1892f). In Shafts, the mother, unlike the anti-feminist ‘old lady’, is imagined as a self-sacrificing, inspirational figure who motivates young women to imagine a more progressive future. An older generation of progressive women is also figured in a regular column: ‘The Steadfast Blue Line’, which was regularly printed opposite the ‘What the Girl Says’ series. The first instalment of the column notes that ‘under this heading will appear short notices of whatever women in any part of the world, or in any class of life, have done or are doing in the cause of progress’ (Anon. 1892b). Like the ‘What the Girl Says’ column, it also invites readers to contribute their views. It thus provides parallel opportunities for girls and women to participate in the feminist cause. The title of the column plays on the notion of a ‘steadfast red line’ in warfare, which identifies the boundary between the army and its foe. The ‘blue line’ is meant to demarcate the front between feminist activists and the perpetrators of ‘injustice, tyranny, impurity, excess of every kind’ (Anon. 1892b). Women and girls are imagined as standing on

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the right side of this line together, unified against injustice, as symbolised by their juxtaposed columns in Shafts. Shafts reinforced this sense of intergenerational collaboration by publishing a weekly ‘roll call’ of women, past and present, who were a ‘constant encouragement and inspiration’ (Anon. 1892c). This included women of the older generation such as Josephine Butler (1828–1906) and Emily Faithfull (1835–95), but also younger activists such as Beatrice Potter Webb (1858–1943) and Lady Isabel Somerset (1851–1921). The names of a number of women writers appear – including authors of an earlier era, such as Harriet Martineau (1802–76), and younger writers, such as Olive Schreiner (1855–1920). Curiously, George Eliot is listed twice, both by her pseudonym and as ‘Marion Evans’ – a duplication that serves as an early feminist acknowledgement of the role of authorial duality in women’s history. Even more intriguingly, in place of Charlotte Brontë’s name, ‘Bertha Mason’ appears in the roll call on 21 January 1893, anticipating late twentieth-century celebration of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ figure as feminist foremother (Anon. 1892d; see also Gilbert and Gubar 1979: 77–8). Shafts constructed a sense of continuity between past and present in order to imagine a more enlightened future. Such an ideal was dependent on the construction of the antagonising ‘old lady’ as much as it relied on the notion of the progressive foremother, who offered both inspiration and support for the younger generation. In this sense, Shafts was participating in what Michelle Tusan has identified as a broader effort in the feminist press to ‘model for the next century, a truly “new” and totally reconstructed woman’ (1998: 171). Yet the construction of the ‘new girl’ in feminist periodicals also reflected trends in commercial print culture, which used images of beautiful young women to sell domestic and journalistic commodities. As Margaret Beetham notes, the ‘female body began in the 1890s and early twentieth century to become a general and pervasive symbol of consumption’ (1996: 151–2).11 At the same time that Shafts ran its ‘What the Girl Says’ series, it also published advertisements for Liebig’s Extract of Beef and Sylvestrine Vegetable Face Powder, along with James Stanley Little’s What the Boy Thought, the very book it had scorned as egotistical in the ‘What the Girl Says’ column (Anon. 1892e). The Suffragette, published a decade later, incorporated illustrated advertisements that emphasised the ‘new girl’ and the new woman as consumers in the commercial marketplace.12 An advert in the 7 February 1913 issue, for example, uses feminist slogans to sell Vilmar’s Hand Cream: ‘ALL LADIES VOTE . . . NO RED HANDS, A SMOOTH VELVETY COMPLEXION’ (Fig. 17.6). Building upon themes of intergenerational solidarity in the letterpress content of the paper, it proclaims ‘NO DIVISION’ and then adds in smaller type, ‘in the opinions of those who have used it’. This echoes language from the paper’s inaugural issue emphasising intergenerational solidarity: ‘The Suffragettes are women who have profited by the freedom won for them by the pioneers of the movement. They are the advanceguard of the new womanhood’ (Anon.1912b). The paper’s dual audience of older and younger women is referenced in a clothing store advert in the 22 November 1912 issue, which offers ‘Frocks for Madam and Mademoiselle’ (Fig. 17.7). A brief editorial note at the bottom of the page reminds readers ‘that they can help “The Suffragette” by dealing as far as possible exclusively with advertisers in the paper’ (Anon. 1912a). In this way, the editors created a conscious link between the consumption of ‘new’ consumer goods and the fashioning of ‘new’

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Figure 17.6 Advertisement for Vilmar’s Cream Company, Suffragette, 7 February 1913: 267. © British Library.

Figure 17.7 Advertisement for Peter Robinson’s clothing store, Suffragette, 22 November 1912: 92. © British Library.

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progressive identities for women. Such a link opened up opportunities for commercial companies such as John Harries clothing store, which advertised ‘rough, every-day coats’ that were ‘eminently suitable for campaigning’ (Fig. 17.8). Such advertisements were of course necessary for feminist periodicals to be financially viable. After all, subscriptions alone were not enough to fund small-circulation newspapers.13 The advertising pages played an enabling role in facilitating the circulation of feminist ideas, but

Figure 17.8 Advertisement for John Harries clothing store, Suffragette, 8 November 1912: 50. © British Library.

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they also created a slippage between ‘new’ feminist identities and ‘new’ frock coats, between the idea of political solidarity among women and the notion of undivided loyalty among consumers of Vilmar’s Cream. Shafts and the Suffragette thus embodied what Margaret Beetham has called the ‘problem of reconciling political radicalism and the strategies of commercial journalism’ (1996: 176).

The Lady’s Realm of Discord Given the inseparability of political and commercial definitions of the ‘new’ in feminist periodicals of the fin de siècle, it is perhaps unsurprising that images of the ‘new girl’ and the new woman also proliferated in mainstream women’s periodicals. Indeed, they were crucial to broadening the appeal of feminism for a general female audience. Sarah Grand’s foundational essay ‘A New Aspect of the Woman Question’ appeared in the North American Review, and some her most trenchant defences of the new woman were published in the Lady’s Realm, an upmarket monthly magazine that incorporated fiction, fashion news, articles on home decoration and frequent discussion of women’s employment and educational opportunities.14 Richly illustrated and affordably priced, it achieved a circulation of 100,000 in 1902 (North 2003). Crucial to the success of the Lady’s Realm, like most other ‘advanced’ women’s periodicals of the fin de siècle, was its list of celebrity contributors, which, in addition to Grand, included Violet Fane (1843–1905) and Marie Corelli (1855–1924), among other literary luminaries. Like other periodicals associated with the New Journalism, it celebrated the latest women writers by publishing their articles and stories and by featuring them in elaborate profiles and portraits intended to promote celebrity worship. A two-page spread on Fane, for example, includes a handwritten poem along with an elaborately framed author portrait (Fig. 17.9). In a later issue, Corelli is featured in a lengthy, rather fulsome essay that includes an interview with the author and photos of her home (Kelly 1898). The fact that both features employed photography reinforced the idea of modernity and newness – the latest writer represented with the latest technologies of photomechanical production. In its emphasis on meeting the needs of the ‘advanced’ woman reader, the Lady’s Realm had much in common with feminist periodicals published during the same period. In fact, its printer, Hazell, Watson, and Viney, also published two feminist papers, the Woman’s Signal and the Woman’s Gazette (Weedon 2009). Yet, unlike its sister publications, the Lady’s Realm was not defined primarily by its feminist politics. Indeed, it often voiced more conservative viewpoints in its pages, sparking controversy that would engage readers and thus increase circulation. In ‘The New Woman and the Old’, for example, Sarah Grand provocatively asserts that the ‘Old Woman has had her day. She has taught us what to avoid in life, many thanks to her, although no one is more disgusted than she is at the effect of her works upon us’ (Grand 1898: 470). ‘The Old Woman’, she remarks, ‘has no notion of progress. She ridicules everything to which she is unaccustomed, as is the way with the ignorant’ (467). The new woman, on the other hand is ‘altering always’ and ‘progressing by degrees’ (468–9). This forward-looking attitude is reflected in M. Bowley’s title illustration at the head of the article, which depicts a young woman gazing into the distance while a shackled old woman attempts to hold her in place (Fig. 17.10). Meanwhile, an angel, reading

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Figure 17.9 Manuscript page of ‘A Deserted Village’ and portrait of Violet Fane, Lady’s Realm, October 1897: 628–9.

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Figure 17.10 M. Bowley, title illustration for ‘The New Woman and the Old’, Lady’s Realm, August 1898: 466–70.

what is perhaps a book of prophecy, faces the rising sun. This image, of course, adapts imagery from the feminist press, most specifically the cover of Shafts (Fig. 17.5), which depicts a young woman in a similar pose. By adding the old woman in shackles, Bowley accentuates the sensationalist opposition between old and new women in Grand’s article. Indeed, the following month’s issue included Lady Jeune’s ‘A Reply to Sarah Grand’, which attacks new women, calling them ‘loud-voiced, discontented viragos’ (Jeune 1898: 602).15 She denies that there is any great divide between young women and the ‘old order’, who have contributed to national ‘greatness’ (601). Continuity, she insists, has characterised recent women’s history, and most women are perfectly content with their lot. The Lady’s Realm, unlike Shafts, gives equal time to feminist and anti-feminist positions, thus capitalising on a sensationalised debate that had been under way since the late 1860s. As Andrea Broomfield points out, conflicts between women were ‘partly staged and their rhetoric exaggerated to promote themselves and to bolster certain periodicals’ reputations and sales’ (2004: 254). Adopting this tactic, the Lady’s Realm was imagined as a scintillating, contentious space rather than a harmonious domestic sphere. Yet by reprinting the title illustration from Grand’s piece with Jeune’s essay (Fig. 17.10), the editors betrayed their bias in favor of the new woman’s position. Such subtle advocacy played an important role in the women’s movement at the fin de siècle since the mass-market Lady’s Realm had the potential of reaching a much larger audience than a small-circulation feminist periodical such as Shafts. This subtle editorial bias towards the feminist cause is also apparent in an 1897 feature titled ‘What to Do with Our Daughters, which includes contributions from

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three popular novelists: Mrs Henry (Julie) Chetwynd (1828–1901), Mrs (Erminda) Rentoul Esler (1860–1924) and Mary Eliza Haweis (1848–98). The first two contributors emphasise the benefits of marriage and domestic economy as appropriate pursuits for young women. ‘Without going into the vexed question of the comparative weights and size of the brains of men and women’, Chetwynd notes, ‘it must be confessed that where power and an original creative faculty are concerned, women’s work often fails’ (1897: 92). Esler argues that while younger women might succeed in public careers, ultimately an ‘old woman in the pulpit, on the platform, in legal wig and gown, would evoke laughter’ (1897: 94). In the modern age, she contends, it is ‘good looks’ that enable women to succeed as ‘favourites of the present hour’ in the professions, including writing, but such fame is destined to fade with age (94). Together, Chetwynd and Esler suggest that women should avoid public careers because of their own inherent incapacities – as well as society’s insurmountable prejudices, which stereotype women as beautiful novelties rather than serious professionals. Haweis concludes the trio of essays with a more progressive argument, asserting that young women should be allowed to ‘feel their feet and balance their own steps’, even if they sometimes stumble and fall (1897: 96). After all, ‘no life is worth living that is not self-developed’ (96). Of the three writers, Haweis was the only one whose work had appeared regularly in the magazine. Her prominence as a regular contributor, when combined with the positioning of her essay at the end of the exchange, places emphasis on her more progressive attitude. In its fictional content, the magazine’s endorsement of the ‘new girl’ and the new woman is more explicit. Emma Brooke’s ‘Love and the Young Generation Open the Door’, for example, tells the story of two middle-aged spinsters, Elizabeth and Rosamund Whincote, who are expecting a visit from Rosamund’s former beau, Mr Gilbert. It soon becomes clear that Elizabeth, the stereotypical ‘old lady’, had years before prevented her younger sister’s marriage and now serves as the ‘rigid gaoler of her own and her sister’s reputation’ (Brooke 1898: 12). When they hear a knock on the door, they imagine it is Gilbert but instead encounter a young neighbour, Helen Stanhope, who enters the room like a breath of fresh air, ‘modern to her finger-tips’ (12). Significantly, Helen claims to have read ‘everything that is new’ – a habit that situates her in the same category as the ‘advanced’ audience of the Lady’s Realm (15). When Gilbert finally arrives, he, like Rosamund, is fascinated by Helen, who has a latchkey, writes for the periodicals and proclaims herself a socialist. Rosamund’s interactions with Helen make her realise that it was wrong to discredit the ‘world’s new thought’ (17). Soon Gilbert realises Rosamund’s change of heart and makes a proposal of marriage, confident that she now possesses an ‘open-minded attitude toward new phases of thought’ (Brooke 1898: 17). In this sense, the story reflects broader trends in commercial new woman novels, which, as Chris Willis notes, often conclude with ‘submission to marriage’ (2001: 64). Yet in ‘Love and the Young Generation Open the Door’, marriage is imagined as coinciding with feminist conversion. The ‘open door’ in the story’s title divides conventional, old definitions of femininity from the fresh possibilities offered by the world outside. Much of the action of the story takes place in these liminal spaces. Helen enters through the front door like a ‘whirlwind’, disrupting the sense of order in the ‘old-fashioned’ yet ‘comfortable sitting room’ (Brooke 1898: 12, 11.) When Helen begins to awaken spiritually, Elizabeth discovers her sister’s transformation at the threshold of her bedroom door: ‘She, too, held a light in her hand; her dark hair flowed over her shoulders and a composed beauty shone in her face which was new even to her sister’

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(16). The accompanying illustration reveals that her conversion has made her both beautiful and new (Fig. 17.11). Moving from inside the home to the world outside ‘where she had never been before’, Rosamund engages with the broader world while at the same time becoming a ‘beauty’ with exchange value within that broader sphere of action (16). Meanwhile, the stereotypical ‘old lady’, Elizabeth, remains single and ‘frightened’ by such ‘ill-judged interference with the ways of Providence’ (17). This concluding image anticipates Sarah Grand’s ‘The New Woman and the Old’, published just three months later, which similarly ends with a new woman ‘knocking at the door’ while the ‘Old Woman draws her hood over her head, and sits in darkness that she may not know us for what we are’ (Grand 1898: 470). Rosamund’s transformation can be seen as an adaptation of the ‘feminist conversion’ narrative genre so ubiquitous in feminist periodicals at the fin de siècle. As Kabi Hartman points out, such narratives focused on women’s ‘conversions to the cause of suffragism and their subsequent new lives’, stories made immediate and relevant through publication in the periodical press (2003: 35, 46). The editors of the Lady’s Realm no doubt aimed to promote such ideological transformation. However, the idea of ‘new life’ also supported the magazine’s commercial aims, which likewise

Figure 17.11 Illustration for ‘Love and the Young Generation Open the Door’, Lady’s Realm, May 1898: 15.

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emphasised beauty and novelty to sell magazine issues and consumer goods. After all, the same issue in which Brooke’s ‘Love and the Young Generation Open the Door’ appeared also included an instalment of the magazine’s lavishly illustrated ‘London and Paris Fashions’ series, which featured the latest frocks, blouses and undergarments. The magazine likewise regularly published advertisements for jewellery and household goods, as well as advertorials on the latest ‘novelties’, promoting everything from Irish linen to cosmetic procedures.16 This reflected a broader trend in print culture where editorial and advertising content were increasingly entwined (see Beegan 2008: 16; Beetham 1996: 193, 199).

Conclusion The Lady’s Realm, like other ‘advanced’ mainstream commercial periodicals, defined the modern woman in complex terms – as a consumer and an advertising commodity, a sensationalist figure of controversy and a symbol of the new spirit of the age. Controversies over the new woman, like advertisements for ‘new’ products, promoted the commercial success of the magazine trade. Yet such representations also forwarded the aims of first-wave feminism, sometimes in subtle ways, dramatising and visualising the ways that ‘advanced’ views were inseparable from the ideal of the ‘modern woman’. In this sense, ‘advanced’ women’s magazines built upon and extended the aims of explicitly feminist periodicals published during the same time period, which emphasised youthfulness and novelty in order to authorise a movement. Just as Brooke’s ‘Love and the Young Generation’ dramatises intergenerational collaboration and conflict, so, too, did feminist periodicals rely upon the idea of ‘generations’ to engage readers and build a political and commercial base. Intergenerational collaboration and conflict are thus crucial to scholarly understanding of women’s engagement with print culture at the fin de siècle. On one hand, women writers and readers had very different experiences in the literary marketplace due to changes in publishing conventions. The decline of anonymous publication, the growth of celebrity journalism, the rise of the New Journalism, and the proliferation of periodicals aimed at women meant that women writers and readers at the fin de siècle experienced print culture in strikingly different ways from those of their mothers and grandmothers. Yet, as Martin Hewitt (2015) reminds us, ‘generations’ is a ‘protean and problematic term’. The actual relationship between generations, he notes, was often ‘fuzzy’ – ‘less a matter of rupture than of modulation’. After all, Sarah Grand (1854–1943) and Mary Jeune (1845–1931) were born less than ten years apart and thus can be said to be of the same ‘generation’ even though they were, ideologically speaking, worlds apart. The press nevertheless emphasised ‘rupture’ rather than ‘modulation’ in defining generational differences, frequently pitting the old woman against the new. As Sarah Grand sarcastically remarked in ‘The New Woman and the Old’, such a binary relationship was the ‘finest work of the imagination which the newspapers have yet produced’ (1898: 466). Yet such an unmodulated construction of ‘generations’ could also be used to justify a movement, to build solidarity among women of different age cohorts and ideological positions. A generational approach to women’s history of the fin de siècle reveals the indivisibility of women writers’ lived experience from media representations, which determined what subjectivities and generational identities they might assume in their engagement with the Woman Question.

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Notes 1. As I have shown elsewhere, the lives and works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë served as especially resonant examples of the kind of independent, passionate subjectivity many young women aspired to emulate at the fin de siècle; see Easley (2016). 2. For more background on the twenty-first-century divide between generations of feminists, see Beltrán (2013). 3. Broomfield (2004) examines Linton’s rise to fame, interpreting her anti-feminism as a selfmarketing tactic that had much in common with Sarah Grand’s provocative self-fashioning in the popular press at the fin de siècle. See also Hamilton (2009) and Easley (2017). For background on the emergence of the new woman as a social identity and media construction, see, for example, Tusan (1998); Richardson and Willis (2001); Schaffer (2001); and Ardis (1990). 4. See Cross (1985: 206), who notes that women’s literacy increased from 73.2 per cent in 1871 to 92.7 per cent in 1891. Median income and the size of the reading public increased correspondingly during the same period. Beetham (1996: 122) estimates that there were over 120 new periodicals marketed to women from 1880 to 1900. 5. For more background on the New Journalism, see Cross (1985: 209–10); Brake (1994: 83–103); and Beetham (1996: 115–30). 6. For background on women’s clubs, see Hughes (2007). 7. See also Beetham (1996: 125–6) and Ledger (1997: 177–98). For a contemporary view of the feminisation of mass-market publishing, see Sykes (1895). 8. For additional background on Shafts, see Beaumont (2006) and Youngkin (2007). 9. Beaumont (2006: 1–3) offers an alternative reading of this image. 10. As Tusan notes, the feminist press not only promoted the new woman as a progressive identity but also valorised ‘women’s dedication to domestic duties and motherhood’ (1998: 176). 11. See also Fraser, Green and Johnston (2003: 191–6) for a discussion of the commodification of women’s bodies in fin-de-siècle fashion magazines. 12. For further discussion of the link between first-wave feminism and commercial culture, see Lysack (2008: 136–70) and Beetham (1996: 176–7). 13. The actual circulation of Shafts is unknown; however, we can presume that it was quite small. Beaumont (2006: 6) notes that the paper was funded primarily by donors and struggled financially. 14. For further background on the Lady’s Realm, see Ledbetter (2009: 55–66). 15. For more background on Jeune’s extensive contributions to the debate over the Woman Question, see Davis (2015). 16. See ‘Hints on Novelties’and ‘The Mirror of Venus’(Anon. 1897a; 1897b). Beetham explores how the ‘novelty, whether a ribbon or knick-knack, was a visible sign of the woman’s skill as a purchaser and her up-to-date knowledge of the latest fashions. . . . The reader could therefore not only regulate her own consumption to produce the right kind of home and self, she could also recognize and read the signs other women produced’ (1996: 96).

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18 Lily Montagu and Liberal Judaism Richa Dwor

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t a debate on the Jewish Question in the Austrian Reichsrat in April of 1890, an anti-Semitic delegate declared Europe’s Jews to be ‘capitalists by precept and in practice’ (Jewish Chronicle, 1890: 11). The Jewish rebuttal, as reported in The Jewish Chronicle of London, turned this argument on its head, and argued that the German emperor himself was enacting a Jewish principle in attempting to introduce laws to limit the hours of labour for European workers. The ancient Jewish institution of the Sabbath, the delegate argues, was the first instance of regulating the working week. In other words, far from being arch-capitalists, Jews are instructed by the Hebrew Bible to rest from work at a set time and to enable others to do the same. The wry claim to have created the precedent for contemporary labour laws leads to a reminder to readers back in England that it ‘is to be hoped that . . . they will not lose sight of the necessity of reasonable concession to Jewish labour, particularly in the context of the sweated industries and the matter of whether one’s day of rest falls on Saturday or Sunday’ (11). This stance displays a key feature of the adaptation of European Jewry to modernity; central to the reformist tendency to reject Talmud and other forms of rabbinic commentary was the valorisation of the Bible itself, both as a site of new reading and interpretative practices modelled on Protestant and secular methods, and as a textual source formative of new nationalist, political, gendered and social identities. It thus arouses little surprise that a commentator in London during the fin de siècle might, with or without a hint of irony, claim Biblical precedence for the German emperor’s decree, even where this relates to an issue as apparently contemporary as labour reform. The association of Jews with capital and with revolutionary politics formed a new iteration of an old anxiety throughout Europe during this decade: that Jews were both unalterably alien and also uncontrollably adaptable, with nefarious ties to usury and political influence. Believing Jews to be adherents of an international capitalist elite and also the destroyers of this establishment thus did not, in the minds of some, present a logical impossibility. It is also true that this period saw an intensification in Jewish socialist politics, in concert with currents in continental political activity. Within a decade of the rejoinder published in The Jewish Chronicle, the General Jewish Labour Union was formed in Vilnius and the concept of Labour Zionism was introduced at the third Zionist Congress in Basel. The ideas underpinning these organisations had been imported to London a decade earlier by Ashkenazi immigrants fleeing tsarist persecution, who had gone on to establish a lively socialist and anarchist scene in the East End of London.

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The emergence of new Jewish labour unions and working men’s organisations in Britain during the mid-nineteenth century challenged but did not remove the popular association of Jews with capital. Meanwhile, the influx of often destitute Jewish migrants from Russia, especially from the 1880s onward, engendered a rift nearly as deep inside the community of Jews in England as outside it, as the class of established, often very wealthy, and in some cases newly ennobled Anglo-Jews felt that their freshly won civil liberties were threatened by their Eastern coreligionists. This established group, who together ran key communal organisations such as the Jewish Board of Deputies and the United Synagogue, had reason to fear the influx of dangerous ideas along with desperate refugees. Displaced intellectuals brought with them atheism and, worse, socialism, which they propounded in Yiddish-language newspapers such as Poilishe Yidl and Arbeter Frainte and which they agitated for in meeting halls and club spaces throughout Whitechapel and Bethnal Green. In England, as already in Germany, debates surrounding Jews and labour, Jews and capital, and Jews and the spectre of revolution were not limited only to the conditions of work but also concerned when and on what terms work might cease.1 Central to internal Jewish class antagonism and the emergence of a new, progressive theology during the 1890s was, in other words, the Sabbath. Conflict regarding Jewish labour and the Sabbath had been under debate in England for some time, just as the Sabbath and its relationship to the Old Testament had loomed large in political life more generally thanks to the ascendancy of Bibletoting Evangelical Protestants. In 1832, a member of the Select Committee on the Observance of the Sabbath Day felt himself compelled to ask: ‘[do] the Jews eat cherries more than any other people?’ (Select Committee 1832: 42). The question was prompted by widespread consternation regarding the sale by Jews of cherries, driven to London from Kent on Saturday afternoons, but held for sale until Sunday mornings. Obliged to observe increasing restrictions on Sunday trading, Jews in England were furthermore prevented by religious law from working on Saturday – their Sabbath – thus losing a day of trade. In the same Select Committee report, there is testimony suggesting that Jewish merchants circumvented Sabbath restrictions on work by hiring a Christian to conduct their business on Saturdays and, as seen with the impropriety of the cherries from Kent, others disregarded the Christian Sabbath to recover lost earnings and capitalise on the absence of competition. In her 1843 novella The Perez Family, the Anglo-Jewish author Grace Aguilar uses desecration of the Sabbath through work to signify just how far from righteousness Reuben, the family’s eldest son, has fallen: His peculiar creed had at first been against him; but when his abilities were put to the proof, and it was discovered he was in truth only nominally a Jew, that he cared not to sacrifice the Sabbath, and that no part of his religion was permitted to interfere with his employments, his services were accepted and well paid. (Aguilar 2003: 107–8) Reuben’s return to the fold is not effected until ‘he felt he was a Jew in heart and soul and reason, as well as name’ including, crucially, on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath (Aguilar 2003: 169). Internal tensions regarding the Sabbath were exacerbated rather

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than resolved by the waves of Jewish Russian immigration in the 1880s and the heated labour politics that ensued.

Generational Rift: Samuel Montagu and Lily Montagu The social and religious developments regarding the Jewish Sabbath were, in a way, characterised by two Montagus, father and daughter. Samuel Montagu (1832–1911), later first Baron Swaythling and president of the Federation of Synagogues, was an affluent banker and a firm supporter of trade unionism who served in parliament as the Liberal MP for Whitechapel from 1885 to 1900. Montagu met the challenges of socialism as transmitted by foreign and often atheistic Jews through traditional forms of political action, namely the levers of parliamentary power. He sat on the House of Lords Select Committee on Sweated Labour, which produced a series of reports that were hostile to socialism and broadly in favour of trade unions. Thus, his patronage of these unions might be conceived as a bulwark against socialism. Viewed through this lens, his role in 1888 in founding the Jewish Tailors’ Machinist Society appears less progressive than pragmatic. He also barely spoke to his daughter Lily after 1909 due to her apparent rejection of Orthodox Judaism, and prohibited in his will the use of his money for Liberal Jewish causes. Lily Montagu (1873–1963), best known now as a founder of Liberal Judaism, was among the first women to be appointed a Justice of the Peace. She was furthermore a member, leader or founder of organisations including the Women’s Industrial Council, the Anti-Sweating League, the National Council of Women and the National Association of Girls’ Clubs. In a memoir, she recalls a conversation with her father when she was a young woman: My imagination was kindled, and I, aged about sixteen, determined to live and work in the East End. Nothing else would satisfy me. When I spoke of these dreams to my father, he said very gently but with such personal conviction that I could not help being impressed: ‘That’s nonsense! You can do what you like from your own home. A Jewish girl does not leave home unless there is something wrong with her. If she does not marry, she waits till she is forty before leaving her family.’ (Montagu 1943: 16) Montagu exceeded these expectations in a number of ways, and with lasting impact. Here we may attend to two key moments in her early progress to frame the development of her thought during the 1890s, a formative decade in her social work and theology. In 1893, when barely out of her teens, she founded the West Central Jewish Girls’ Club, a social, educational and religious organisation for Jewish girls and working women. Six years later, in 1899, she wrote an article called ‘The Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day’ which galvanised the fledging Liberal Judaism movement. Soon after she co-founded the Jewish Religious Union, an association of Orthodox, Reform and Liberal Jews that sought to revitalise the religious life of Anglo-Jewry. Montagu remained unmarried, was virtually disinherited by her father, and overcame considerable shyness to become a lay minister, publish prolifically across a range of genres, and marshal an international agenda for the formation of a

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wholly new religious organisation.2 She did not, in other words, abide by her father’s advice that ‘[a] Jewish girl does not leave home unless there is something wrong with her’ (Montagu 1943: 16). Still, the sad estrangement between father and daughter did not always prevail, and Montagu recalls the warmth and ritual of childhood Sabbaths spent with family: The Sabbath was, I think, always a day of joy. We liked walking to the Synagogue with our mother and looking round at the congregation. Our father generally went to synagogue at an earlier hour than ourselves. The service itself, with its long scriptural portion read in Hebrew, simply bored me, but not badly enough for me to resent the experience of having to sit still. (Montagu 1941: 7) Her boredom would eventually lead her to question the orthodoxy of her upbringing, and to spearhead the creation of a new form of Jewish spirituality in Britain that had at its heart the very secular concern of workers’ rights, especially the rights of women workers. The 1890s for Jews in Britain was a period of genteel upheaval. If Samuel Montagu’s decision to cut his daughter off looks harsh and in the worst tradition of the draconian Victorian patriarch, it is true that while Lily Montagu’s social concerns are in essence continuous with her father’s, they also represent a radicalisation of these concerns, and that this radicalisation was due to religious change. She had, as we shall see, fundamentally changed her religion due to the influence of the higher criticism, conveyed through the mentorship of the Rev. Simeon Singer and Claude Montefiore and, as Ellen M. Umansky has argued, through being ‘shaped by those literary sources with which she was familiar’ (Umansky 1983: 58). This led to a profound reimagining of her Judaism in which it, rather than politics or legislation, became the agent of social change. The Sabbath she remembered from childhood became no longer a comfortable ritual but instead an opening of a space for reform that avoided the need for outright social revolution. Lily Montagu’s social teaching, first developed during the 1890s through her founding of the West Central Jewish Girls’ Club, was aimed at a radical but not revolutionary overhaul of capitalism, and was rooted in the intellectual and theological revolutions of the fin de siècle. In this, she bears comparison to some Christian contemporaries who similarly rooted a social democratic critique of capitalism in later Victorian incarnational theology. In his recent article on R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), for example, James Kirby find that ‘to stress the religious component of Tawney’s thought is therefore not to detract from his status as a political and social thinker, but rather to underline it’ (Kirby 2016: 822). Recent scholars have found that female activists of the 1880s–1890s were motivated by the idea of a God of love who wanted his followers to tackle social problems. These scholars’ work has thus shown that religious shifts could be causative of changes in attitudes to society and gender (see Koven 2014). Montagu worked at the crossroads of these movements and was instrumental in pressing for systemic social reform, as well as in bringing reforms to Jewish practice. In one of the most significant moves early in the life of the Club, Montagu held Sabbath services in the afternoon, rather than the morning, so that those working a half-day on Saturdays could attend after work. Now viewed as a revolutionary moment in Jewish theological liberalism, it marks the first occasion in modern

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times that Halacha, the Jewish law, was bent to fit the needs of working girls and women. If, though, as Koven claims, ‘shelves groan from the weight of books’ about philanthropic women motivated by religion, why another piece on Lily Montagu (2014: 10)? Given Anglo-Jewry’s borrowing from Protestant culture, we might ask whether Montagu’s left politics are animated by the same formulation of religion and politics that drove some of her non-Jewish philanthropic contemporaries (Koven 2014: 10). In response to such queries, this chapter argues that there is a distinctly Jewish approach that can be included in a discourse of religion and labour politics in the 1890s. In other words, it is a moot point whether Montagu’s socialism derives from Judaism, or whether she is a socialist seeking in Judaism an inspiring framework of belief to animate social action. Montagu is an exemplar of the 1890s as a febrile period for new religious and political organisations, and was tireless particularly in her reimagining of the Jewish day of rest. Her intervention into debates regarding the Sabbath, and thus a view onto the wider context of religion and labour during the 1890s, can best be understood against the backdrop of, first, key disputes and organisations stemming from the 1867 Workshop Regulation Act and, second, a developing liberal theology that was played out on the pages of the Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR), founded in 1889 by Claude Montefiore. A single principle underlies Montagu’s engagement with both labour laws and liberal theology: laws must make rational sense, and operate for the benefit of those who are ruled by them. Arriving at this principle represented, in a sense, the polarising choice between her father and Montefiore.3 This choice is dramatised in a recollection of her early thoughts regarding Jewish dietary laws. Her father advises that ‘it was far safer and better cheerfully to obey too much than too little’ (Montagu 1941: 4). ‘As a young child’, she recalls, ‘I was quite convinced’ (4). It is the influence of Montefiore that prompts her resolution that ‘the human spirit must make itself responsible for the conduct of life. It could not be enslaved by laws which had lost their meaning’ (4). Dietary laws, like all other forms of observance required by Jewish law, must be opened up to individual, rational reflection and not merely obeyed. In this spirit, Montagu spent the 1890s exercising reason in the service of social justice and spirituality. This began with the founding of the West Central Jewish Club in 1893 and reached an apex in the 1899 article ‘The Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day’, written at the behest of Montefiore for the JQR.

Sabbath and Socialism In the Fourth Commandment, God instructs worshippers to ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God’ (Exodus 20:8–10). In Judaism, the Sabbath is observed from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, the seventh day, and in most forms of Christianity it is observed on Sunday, the first day. This discrepancy has its origins in early Christian modifications of Jewish customs, both to avoid becoming targets of anti-Jewish feeling, and in view of the increasing significance of Sunday as the Lord’s Day (dies Domenica). Christ’s resurrection (Matthew 28:1), his subsequent appearances and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2:1), for example, took place on Sundays. It took another millennium for Sunday to overtake Saturday entirely as the Christian day of worship and, in England, this day gradually took on distinctive characteristics through a series of acts and decrees. For example, tennis and

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football were outlawed on Sundays by Richard II in 1388 (archery was preferred), and a pious Henry VI prohibited in 1448 the sale and display of goods, barring necessary foodstuffs, on feast days and Sundays (Wigley 1980: 11). By the nineteenth century, the influence of Sabbatarians in parliament meant that though public houses were open on Sundays, museums remained closed and most forms of trade prohibited. Reformers and temperance campaigners noted the illogic of this combination, in which it was possible to drink alcohol but not to consume the educative benefits of high culture. These tensions show not only the extent to which Sunday trading and Sunday closing were confused, but also the prevailing condescension in regarding the working classes as ‘very much in the condition of children’ (Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Acts to Prevent Unnecesarry Trading on Sunday, 1850, quoted in Harrison 1965: 220). Indeed, attempts by the well off to close both trading and drinking loopholes in order to produce an immaculate Sunday went down very badly during the 1850s, especially in cities, in ways which were echoed forty years later (Harrison 1965: 220–1). This was the era of the Wilson-Patten Act (1854), which required drinking places to close on Sunday apart from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., and the Sunday Trading Bill (1855), which made a largely secular case for the closure of small and large shops on that day. Restrictions on Sunday trading were deeply unpopular among working people, who, as Brian Harrison points out, ‘believed that goods were cheaper’ on Sunday morning and many of whom were not paid before Saturday evening, making Sunday the most convenient day to shop (1965: 221). During the summer of 1855, those working people, viewed as ‘children’ who had to be tutored into honouring the Sabbath, rioted instead. Karl Marx, who was present at two of the three riots which occurred in Hyde Park on successive Sundays, viewed the new Bill as a ‘conspiracy between the Church and the capitalist monopolies’ which penalised the poor to assuage the moral inadequacies of the rich (Marx 1953: 415). Alex Murray describes these riots as ‘another symptom that the class warfare that had so recently plagued the Continent was fomenting in London’ and, in their uneasy combination of class, labour, religion and unsettling influences from abroad, they presage aspects of the Jewish conflict surrounding a day of rest that would occur during the 1890s (Murray 2016: 317). Running concurrently with debates about the Sabbath in Britain were high tensions within British Jewry about socialism in its midst. When the Hebrew Socialist Union held its first meetings in Gun Street, Spitalfields, in 1876, debate hinged on whether to organise on behalf of international socialist unity or to become instead a Jewish socialist party. Were the interests of Jewish workers distinct, its founders pondered, from those of an international proletariat? In London, they were: immigration in flight from pogroms and conscription in Russia, anti-alien sentiment in the docklands and workshops of the East End, sweated labour, and policies adopted by established Anglo-Jews to discourage settlement of the ‘practically destitute’ contributed to distinctive and dire economic conditions for Jewish workers (Jewish Chronicle 1886: 16). Internal Jewish class antagonism fed on fear lest growing antipathy towards the new arrivals from the East should undermine the social position of those with deeper roots in Britain.4 Strong resistance to socialism was mounted by the United Synagogue (formed in 1870 through the joining of five Ashkenazi synagogues in London) and the Board of Deputies, and voiced by the sympathetic Jewish Chronicle. Socialist organisers were defamed by falsely being labelled conversionists or

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missionaries, thus linking socialism with the unthinkable: apostasy. Socialist agitators, such as Morris Winchevsky, learned from initial discord to conceal their atheism, and to avoid offending the orthodoxy of the masses with anti-religious rhetoric. On the pages of his Yiddish-language newspaper the Poilishe Yidl, Winchevsky divorced socialism from apostasy and depicted instead a picture of ‘immigrant life . . . with political indoctrination more subtly applied’ (Fishman 1975: 140). Seeing this gradual normalising of socialist concepts, and recognising for themselves the necessity for Jewish industries to organise to ensure adherence to the Factory Acts, established Anglo-Jewry endeavoured by the 1880s to oversee, rather than to prevent, unionisation. Further actions were taken in parliament to protect Jewish labour. Jewish emancipation had been achieved in 1858 when Lionel de Rothschild was permitted to take his seat in the House of Commons without uttering the phrase ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ from the oath of abjuration (Hansard 1850: 426). Sir David Salomons, unable to take his seat when elected as Liberal MP for Greenwich in 1851, was re-elected in 1859 following this precedent and entered parliament, having also been elected the first Jewish mayor of London in 1855. In 1871 Salomons made a motion for an amendment to the 1867 Workshop Regulation Act, marking the first occasion on which the Jewish Sabbath was protected under law. The 1867 Act regulated working hours and conditions for women and children across a range of industries. Solomons’s, motion was to exempt ‘young persons and women of the Jewish religion from penalties from working on Sundays’ (Workshop Regulation Act, 1867, Amendment 1871). This exemption from penalty could be made on two conditions: first, that the workshop remained closed until sundown on Saturday and was ‘not open for traffic’ (in other words, open to manufacture but not trading) on Sunday, and second, that the workers in question could not be made to exceed the total number of hours of labour permitted in one week under the 1867 Act. Those wishing to avoid the penalty for Sunday work must thus be employed by a factory that adhered strictly to a Jewish Sabbath on the Saturday and also operated under measured conditions on Sundays. Despite this and other efforts by Jewish MPs to alleviate inequalities experienced by Jewish workers (in part, as we have seen, to forestall more radical measures) they proved unequal to the growth of sweated labour, particularly in the tailoring trade. In an 1887 report to the Board of Trade on the sweating system, H. G. Calcraft places the blame squarely on these Jewish immigrants for their own woes, for the economic depression faced by native workers, and even for a tendency towards moral contagion which might exceed the environs of London’s East End. Due to ‘the unhappy foreigners’, there has grown up in our midst a system so bad in itself and so surrounded by adherent evils as to have caused, not only among the workers themselves, great suffering and misery, but in the minds of others grave apprehensions of public danger. (Calcraft 1887: 4) This grave apprehension was addressed by a Select Committee of the House of Lords on the sweating system, which published a series of reports on its findings between 1888 and 1890. The Committee, on which sat Samuel Montefiore and other prominent

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members of the Jewish community, paid specific attention to work on the Sabbath and the moral condition of female workers. This latter concern animated their interrogation of an inspector inclined to take a rosy view of working conditions for women: It has been said that in former years, before the sweating system reached the present pitch, the morality among the female Jews was very good indeed, and that since then it has considerably deteriorated, and is much lower now than it was a few years ago; is that within your experience? ‘I should not like to say so. I do not think that the immorality amongst the Jewish girls has increased to any very great extent.’ You do not think that the sweating system has in any way tended to produce that result? ‘No, I do not.’ Do you mean that you do not consider that the circumstance of men and women working together and so on produces immorality? ‘Not to any great extent.’ (Select Committee 1888: 21) Committee members’ emphasis on the morality of female Jews was doubtless driven by care for those women but perhaps also at its core by anxiety about the perception of poor Jews by outsiders. Attempts to remedy both ills would take the form of a series of recommendations regarding segregation and inspection of factories.

Lily Montagu’s Social Work and Theology Montagu founded the West Central Club against this backdrop of fear and anger regarding Jews and labour at the nexus of sweated industries such as tailoring and the production of ready-made clothing. Industrial unrest in the period had already led to the formation of the Women’s Trade Union Association (WTUA) in 1889, created to organise female workers and ensure in particular employers’ adherence to the 1874 Factory Act, which raised the minimum working age to nine, and limited the working day for women and children to 10 hours in the textile industry. Although Montagu eventually became president of the National Organisation of Girls’ Clubs, which was overseen by the governance of the WTUA (later the Women’s Industrial Council), her motivation in forming a club in 1893 was not to defend Jewish workers from outside threats, nor was it conceived as a divertingly charitable undertaking for philanthropic women with time on their hands. Simply put, it was ‘aimed at keeping Judaism alive in our young people’ (Montagu 1943: 19). Her 1943 memoire My Club and I: The Story of the West Central Jewish Club records the haphazard and idealistic early years of the club. In some respects, Montagu’s presentation of her work is highly reminiscent of Christian socialist organisations whose members elected to live among those they wished to serve, an exercise in boosting fellowship by entering into the lives of the poor rather than patronising them from a distance as their predecessors had supposedly done. Montagu insisted, for example, on an empathetic understanding of the lives of young working Jews, who made up the greater numbers of the Jewish community in London and whose social and economic experience was far from her own milieu. She was quick to sniff out and exclude any hint of condescension from patrons or teachers,

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and went to extraordinary lengths first to account for the girls’ laxity in observing religious obligations, and then to accommodate them. Jean Spence further notes that Montagu’s objective for the Club moved beyond ‘refinement’ or ‘improvement’ to encompass systemic social reform via understanding and implementing labour laws and providing training to workers (Spence 2004: 495). While she seems in one sense to exemplify the familiar figure of the late Victorian socialist, most of whom were liberal or agnostic Protestants, there is of course a further context to Montagu’s work. Her project was not simply one of moving among poor people. It was explicitly one of moving among poor Jewish people. The Club itself was born out of the Sunday excursions that Montagu and her female cousins were invited to lead for those attending a Sabbath class, held on Saturdays, by Emily Harris. Harris had been tasked by Lady Charlotte de Rothschild and Constance Rothschild, Lady Battersea, to lead these services in a Bloomsbury location provided for that purpose. Montagu’s involvement in Jewish women’s organisations thus originated among this elite circle. The girls themselves, it seems, so enjoyed the Sunday afternoon outings, lectures and entertainment that they suggested the formation of a more permanent club. Rooms were taken at 71 Dean Street, in Soho, and the Club began amid the optimism of its founder and earliest members, and the apprehension of Montagu’s relatives and well-heeled social circle, who ‘spoke of the bad manners of some of our audience’ (Montagu 1943: 23). In the face of this condescension, Montagu insists that: [a] club worker must enter on her career in the learning spirit. She must not attempt to foist her standards on the girls among whom she intends to work. She must study their standards, and exchange their points of view. (23) Harder to assuage were her mother’s fear of what might befall Montagu, then aged twenty, on solitary evening walks to Dean Street, and also the effect on her social prospects of spending too many evenings at the Club. Montagu largely ignored the second fear, and agreed to walk always with her sister whenever it was necessary to ‘visit the danger zone of Soho’ (25). Believing that ‘the Club should be in miniature a world at its best’, Montagu took on the sweating system and women’s rights as workers (1943: 58). With assistance from the local council, the Club founded a cooperative business making artificial flowers, employing Jewish and non-Jewish women to work a five-day week, including Sabbath observance on Saturdays. Montagu sought a range of methods to familiarise girls with Factory Acts relating to their working conditions, including writing a ‘skillful rhyme’ with Clementina Black that ‘roused considerable mirth’, in contrast to the ‘unattractive reading’ of the Acts themselves (65). These efforts bore fruit as ‘[girls] became unafraid to tell of the many ruses which bad employers used to outwit the inspector’ (66). In this world in miniature, the rights and autonomy of women workers could occur in harmony with the Jewish day of rest. Although she effected a subtle rebellion against familial expectation, Montagu did not originate her religious interventions, and in testing them out at the West Central Jewish Club she acted in part on the influence on her mentor, Claude Montefiore.5 Montefiore was himself a student of German Reform Judaism, which spread throughout Western Europe and America from the 1820s onward. As Michael Meyer argues in his global history of Jewish Reform, however, Reform in England was ‘something

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other than simply an extension of the German Reform movement. It was more a response to the specific circumstances of Anglo-Jewry than to the ideology of a Geiger or Holdheim’ (Meyer 1988: 177). In Montagu’s Club work, then, we see an integration of ideas from Jewish Reform with thoroughly local initiatives for social work and organisation of labour. So it is that she arrives at this formulation: It was all important that we should ask all those under our influence to discover God’s word, and try to live in accordance with it in their working lives. If they lived truly by His word, they could worship Him all day long, whatever they were doing, and not only at Sabbath services. Moreover, they could hallow any day and every day through prayer, and could use for worship any part of the recognised Sabbath which was at their disposal. (Montagu 1943: 41) Religion here is personal, sacred time can animate the working day, and Halacha may be revisited to accommodate the new needs of each generation and social class. This has the effect of, at least in theory, decentring the Sabbath as a unique time set aside for worship and reflection, and also of introducing flexibility to the injunction against performing work on that day. The developing theology of Liberal Judaism allowed Montagu to take a highly tolerant view of Sabbath breakers but also to insist on the essential value of the Sabbath itself. Montagu’s tolerance did not remove the problem of how to alleviate ‘the boredom which a traditional service evoked’, and also of how to respond to grave concerns regarding her apparent practice of accommodating religious life to the demands of work (45). Unsurprisingly, she encountered considerable criticism, from some of her collaborators, who felt that Sabbath breakers should be denied Club membership, to those, like her father, who viewed these innovations as tantamount to heresy. Montagu countered these challenges on both economic and theological grounds and, in so doing, worked out a position that became the animating voice of Liberal Judaism. In the chapter called ‘Religion in the Club’, she meets head-on ‘the economic pressure of the age which made strict Sabbath observance impossible for those who wished to live independent lives’, as well as disinclination caused by exhaustion, the allure of time spent with family, day-tripping, shopping and even the admission that ‘London weather is seldom the right weather for synagogue attendance’ (41, 47). Crucially, Montagu never once decries the indifference of a younger generation, but looks instead to its causes. Their parents, she reasons, are recent immigrants who view their Judaism negatively as ‘not Christianity’ due to the persecution and pogroms they experienced in the lands which they had fled (44).6 Interest is restored at Dean Street by conducting services in English, the introduction of choral singing and organ music, the seating of men and women together, a separate children’s address, and a revision of liturgy so that ‘only such prayers were used which had a meaning for modern Jews and Jewesses in the actual circumstances of their lives. The sermons treated of vital subjects’ (46). These innovations were carried over to the West Central Jewish Liberal Congregation, the new synagogue of Liberal Judaism, when it opened in 1928. There had been a precedent for Saturday afternoon services. In 1889, a group of ‘radicals’ wishing to modernise Jewish services planned to hold afternoon services ‘to avoid competition with any synagogue or with any movement for establishing one’

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(Rigal and Rosenberg 2004: 17). The first such service attracted a congregation of over two hundred to the West Hampstead Town Hall (7). This indicates both the decorousness of this push for reform and also its potential popularity. It does not, though, imply that work could be permitted on the Sabbath, or that those who chose to work might in some sense be accommodated. In 1891, Montagu’s mentor the Reverend Simeon Singer led a service primarily in English for women of the East End. It was held at the Jewish Working Men’s Club, founded by Samuel Montagu in 1872. A description of the event in The Jewish Chronicle observed that the service ‘produced a palpably deep impression on those present, to many of whom it was clear that Hebrew was unfamiliar’ (Jewish Chronicle 1891: 9).7 In building on these precedents and in offering Sabbath services in the Club, Montagu combined afternoon scheduling with liturgy that will be affecting for a female congregation not likely to be educated in Hebrew. Crucially, however, she chooses the afternoon, not to avoid conflict with other services, but in view of the practicalities of congregants’ working lives: We could only win the few, and that we were determined to do through organising Sabbath services on Saturday afternoons and providing services on the Holy days. We chose Saturday afternoons because our members usually ceased work at 1 o’clock, and could attend a service after dinner. Services on Sundays would have been considered Christian by the unthinking. (Montagu 1943: 44) Unfailingly devout herself, Montagu attended regular services in the morning, after which she ‘walked with [her] beloved sister to Dean Street’ to conduct another for Club-goers (45). The version of the Jewish Sabbath enacted through this second service places worship on a par with secular labour, but only in the belief that holiness animates both. It is interesting to note, too, the more radical suggestion that only ‘unthinking’ convention keeps this worship moored to a Saturday. One logical outcome of this refashioning of tradition, later averted but newly open to discussion during the 1890s, was the desacralisation of the Sabbath. This debate took place on the pages of the Jewish Quarterly Review. Defining Reform Judaism in an early issue of the JQR, Claude Montefiore characterises it ‘a belief in the slow but real progress of mankind in knowledge, goodness and pure religion’ that for many had replaced the belief in a personal Messiah and a desire for ‘renewal of the national life in Palestine’ (Montefiore 1889: 276). As the co-founder and first editor of the JQR, Montefiore advanced but also critiqued Reformist ideas from the continent. Reviewing a contemporary work of German Jewish theology, which sets out a rationale for desacralising symbolic aspects of Jewish ritual by pointing to their anthropological roots, Montefiore queries with pithy frustration how, in practice, such rituals might actually be altered in a new Reformgemeinde: ‘Whether “Reformed Jews” have still to fast upon the Atonement Day we are not informed’ (274).8 He is concerned with the intellectual exercise of Reform, but also more pressingly with its implementation.9 This intellectual exercise is furthermore one with space for disagreement. Among the many female contributors under Montefiore’s editorship is Frances A. Joseph, who records being asked by Montefiore to write on Jewish dietary laws, and also points to her difference of opinion from his. Joseph described eating practices characterised by ‘instances of self-denial from

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religious motives’: ‘ “All very trivial and silly,” Mr. Montefiore will say; but to me it means the suppression of desire as the call of duty, therefore something noble and beautiful’ (Joseph 1896: 648).10 The journal was one that gave serious and considered thought to religious reform, and advocated such changes as liturgy in the vernacular, egalitarian seating in synagogues, and shorter services. It also, however, interrogated the limits of these reforms and Montefiore was apparently a supportive editor who tolerated views that differed from his own. It is in this spirit perhaps that he prevailed upon Montagu on 1899 to write the article that she would look back to throughout her life as a pivotal moment in the formation of Liberal Judaism. ‘The Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day’ begins with a comparison between two types of Jew in London – the East End and West End Jew – and ends by declaring England uniquely positioned to enact a galvanic, international renewal of Judaism. The East End Jew is ‘vigorous’, ‘obedient’ and ‘rigid’ (Montagu 1899: 218). This is the so-called Ghetto Jew who, in Montagu’s eyes, merely approaches the divine ‘at prescribed times and seasons’ and, worse, has imbued ritual itself with the reverence that should be reserved for God. The West End Jew, who is not in sympathy with his apparently insular and ignorant coreligionist, is callous, indifferent and materialistic (218–19). To the extent that he experiences any moral insight or religious feeling, it is untutored and likely to be ahistorical and without the ‘outward embodiment’ of ritual (219). Having diagnosed the failings of both models (thus mapping London geography onto a Jewish class structure), Montagu takes aim at the very strategies to re-engage and integrate these groups that she has promoted for the past decade. Speaking admiringly of Sabbath services for working Jews, she nevertheless regrets that the day of rest serves capitalism and not the soul: ‘it is to be feared that the Sabbath, instead of being desired as a day for the renewal of spiritual life, or as a stimulus to moral progress, is now required for more physical rest and idleness’ (219). Women ‘cling to the domestic side of religion’ (220), children’s sermons do not ‘materially relieve the tedium of the service’, and preaching to mixed congregations makes leaders ‘generally selfconscious’ (221). Like other Jewish writers during this period, Montagu’s unyielding self-assessment of Jewish culture pinpoints gambling, materialism and intermarriage as causes of the decay of community and faith. Julia Frankau’s 1887 novel Dr Phillips, for example, tells of a Jewish doctor who poisons his wife so that he can marry his gentile mistress. Unlike Frankau, whose novel is frankly anti-Semitic though she was Jewish herself, Montagu expresses ‘hope, glorious and infinite’ (223). Her hope resides in a single concept: association. Association here is a compound of bureaucracy and selective theology, founded on the premise of reviving a purer version of Judaism, one of ‘truth, dignity, and beauty’ (Montagu 1899: 225). To achieve this revival, ‘we must sift with all reverence’ to detect ancient laws with modern relevance (225). This return to origins can only be broadcast more widely through the cultural infrastructure of ‘certain ceremonial observances’, meaning ritual has its place as a ‘means for the attainment of holiness’ as well as in creating community cohesion (225, 226). Montagu appears to call for greater consensus and sincerity in carrying out the reforms she and others had trialled during the 1890s, as the outcomes of association – education of children, perpetual awareness of God that is not limited to formal observance – are identical to those already pursued in some quarters. An additional outcome that is articulated here, however, is the growth and spread of this way of thinking; first, that its adherents should ‘increase in

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number’ (227), and second, that they should effect a global mission on behalf of persecuted Jews elsewhere in the world. Here a notion of English exceptionalism enters the argument, as Montagu outlines how it is that ‘the present is the right hour, and England is the fit place for the initiation of this movement, which may restore to Judaism its glory’ (227). Just as George Eliot does satirically in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ (1879), Montagu claims that a certain kind of English Jew is uniquely equipped to bring succour both to English social ills and to the suffering of global Jewry. This position comes with serious condescension towards ‘our foreign brothers, whose eyes are blinded’ as well as towards ‘the racial Jew’ in England, ‘indeed deserving of every scorn’ (230). Judaism for Montagu is a spiritual inheritance, not an embodied one, and its survival is contingent on transformation to ‘forms acceptable to emancipated minds’ (228). This position removes from Judaism the slur of racial degeneration satirised a decade earlier by Amy Levy in the novel Reuben Sachs (1888) and theorised by Max Nordau in Degeneration (1895). The climax of Montagu’s piece, then, envisions a kind of deracinated nationalism, a future for Jewry that interacts seamlessly with the secular, economic world but carries forth practices from the past, reimagined through present claims to enlightenment.

Conclusion In March of 1899, shortly after the publication of ‘The Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day’, Montagu sent a letter to a small group who she felt would ‘sympathise with [her] objects’, seeking their views on the essential features of the new Judaism. She asked five questions, the third of which deals with Sabbath observance: What forms and ceremonies should be retained on account of their historical or ethical or sanitary value? (Special reference to the seventh day Sabbath and to festivals commemorating alleged miraculous events.) (Montagu 1985) Amid the scepticism of ‘alleged’ miracles, observance of the Sabbath on the seventh day is non-negotiable, even as its rationale may yet lie somewhere between the historical, ethical and sanitary. This is because, for Montagu, marking the Sabbath, whether by abstaining from work or not, represents all the new possibilities for reform: both the reinvigoration of spiritual life for Jews, and a movement towards greater fairness for Jewish (and non-Jewish) children, women and workers. In arriving at this position and taking the steps that would lead to association in reality, and thus the formation of the Jewish Religious Union in 1902, Montagu had spent a decade steering a course between, on the one hand, the extremes of socialism disseminated in the East End and, on the other, the liberal establishment typified by her father. She did so to achieve social change through religion; religion, however, that was unlike the atheism of the foreign-born radicals or the Orthodox piety of her family home. Montagu helped to establish Liberal Jewish synagogues throughout Britain, often serving as their chair or president. By 1926, she had gone so far beyond the scope of her family home as to help found, and then become president of, the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Between 1926 and 1959 she oversaw the establishment of new congregations in Europe, South America, Israel, South Africa and Australia (Umansky 2009). Ultimately, though, her political sympathies were with her father. Like him, she

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viewed unionisation as desirable and wished to avoid outright social revolution. Their break occurred not when Montagu wished to use religion as a means to achieve social change, but rather when she insisted that this could work only insofar as religion itself was made to accommodate the social.

Notes 1. This became a London-centric issue, just at the time when the capital’s East End was increasingly viewed by those in the West as ‘a heathen quagmire peopled by Jews, drunks, prostitutes and criminals all threatening to undermine the elegant foundations of imperial London’; see Hunt (2004: 83). 2. The role of lay minister was developed by Liberal Judaism in 1943 to certify qualified people to act as ministers when rabbis were not available. Positions were open to men and women. Qualifications included ‘some knowledge of Hebrew, Bible and the principles of Liberal Judaism as well as evidence of the ability to preach and to supervise religious classes’; see Umansky (1983: 326). Lily Montagu was part a small group first inducted at a ceremony in 1944. 3. Though not totally polarising, as her father evidently shared this assumption in relation to workplace relations, just not in relation to religion. This in practice marks the crucial generational shift from father to daughter. 4. Those who sought assistance from their wealthier coreligionists, meanwhile, pointed to nearuniversal loathing of the figure of the Jewish financier as the embodiment of avarice and cosmopolitan conniving, and blamed this for the unhappy welcome from their working-class neighbours in the East End. 5. Claude Montefiore (1858–1938) was a scholar and founder of Liberal Judaism. He was the son of Nathaniel Mayer Montefiore (a nephew of Sir Moses Montefiore) and Emma née Goldsmid, and so was descended from two of London’s most wealthy and well-connected Jewish families. Following his wife’s death in 1889, Montefiore abandoned plans to become a rabbi, and instead used his private wealth to pursue studies in religion independently; these came to include the Jewish origins of Christianity. Some have speculated that Lily Montagu was in love with Montefiore, and that his marriage in 1902 to his first wife’s tutor, Florence Fyfe Brereton (d. December 1938), came as a grave disappointment. As noted, Montagu herself never married. See Alderman (2004). 6. In opposing the ‘superstition’ of old-world Ashkenazi Judaism, Montagu is a conversionist of a kind. Like the Evangelical Protestants who decried ‘rabbinism’ and sought to convert Jews (and Jewish women in particular) to hasten the second coming of Christ, Montagu targets the same population with the aim of bringing them into the fold of a truer religion, except here this is a modified version of Judaism; see Endelman (2015). 7. The article itself moves easily between transliterated Hebrew and Hebrew script in listing the prayers that were included in the service, implying that its assumed readership is familiar with liturgy and can read Hebrew (and is thus not comprised of the women for whom this service was organised). 8. Montefiore is reviewing Lehrbuch nach den Grundsätzen der jüdischen Reformgemeinde zu Berlin by I. H. Ritter. 9. Jewish education for children and adults is also a pressing concern of the journal, with articles on the subject appearing in most issues throughout the 1890s. Joseph Jacobs, the social scientist whose composite photographs of Jewish boys prepared for Frances Galton in 1885 contributed to Galton’s theory of eugenics, undertook further research on Jewish origins in the JQR, in articles such as ‘When Did the Jews First Settle in England?’ (1889) and ‘Spanish Jewish History’ (1896). 10. This exchange anticipates Lily Montagu’s critique of her father’s model of obedience to these same laws.

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Works Cited Aguilar, G. ([1843] 2003), The Perez Family, in M. Galchinsky (ed.), Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings, Peterborough: Broadview Press, pp. 87–179. Alderman, G. (2004), ‘Montefiore, Claude Joseph Goldsmid (1858–1938)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35080 Calcraft, H. (1887), Copy of the Report to the Board of Trade, on the Sweating System at the East End of London by the Labour Correspondent of the Board, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Eliot, G. (1879), ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, in G. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, London: William Blackwood and Sons, pp. 202–34. Endelman, T. (2015), Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fishman, W. (1975), East End Jewish Radicals: 1875–1914, London: Duckworth. Frankau, J. (1887), Dr Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll, London: Vizetelly. Hansard (1850), Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. 113, London: Cornelius Buck. Harrison, B. (1965), ‘The Sunday Trading Riots of 1855’, Historical Journal, 8. 2: 219–45. Hunt, T. (2004), Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Jacobs, J. (1896), ‘Spanish Jewish History’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 8. 4: 709–10. Jacobs, J. (1889), ‘When Did the Jews First Settle in England?’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 1. 3: 286–8. Jewish Chronicle (1891), ‘Services for Women, By One Who Was Present’, Jewish Chronicle, 13 November: 9. Jewish Chronicle (1890), ‘The Labour Conference’, Jewish Chronicle, 28 March: 11. Jewish Chronicle (1889), ‘Proposed Sabbath Afternoon Service at Hampstead’, Jewish Chronicle, 20 December: 17. Jewish Chronicle (1886), ‘The Emigration of Jews from Russia’, Jewish Chronicle, 10 December: 18. Joseph, F. (1896), ‘The Dietary Laws from a Woman’s Point of View’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 8. 4: 643–51. Kirby, J. (2016), ‘R. H. Tawney and Christian Social Teaching: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism Reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 131. 551: 93–822. Koven, S. (2014), The Matchgirl and the Heiress, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Langton, D. (2010), ‘Piety, Tradition and Community in the Thought of Lily Montagu: An Anglo-Liberal Jewish Theology of Relation’, Women in Judaism, 7. 2, http://wjudaism. library.utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/view/15067 Levy, A. (1888), Reuben Sachs, London: Macmillan. Marx, K. ([1855] 1953), ‘Agitation Against the Sunday Trading Bill’, Neue Oder Zeitung, 25 June, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Britain, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, pp. 414–20. Meyer, M. (1988), Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Montagu, L. ([1899] 1985), ‘[Letter] Private collection of Eric Conrad, London (24 March, 1899)’, in E. Umansky (ed.), Lily Montagu: Sermons, Addresses, Letters and Prayers, New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, p. 289. Montagu, L. (1943), My Club and I: The Story of the West Central Jewish Club, London: Herbert Joseph. Montagu, L. (1941), The Faith of a Jewish Woman, London: Messer, Simpkin Marshall. Montagu, L. (1899), ‘The Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 11. 2: 216–31. Montefiore, C. (1889), ‘Review: Dr Ritter’s Text-Book of Reformed Judaism’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 1. 3: 271–8.

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Murray, A. (2016), ‘The London Sunday Faded Slow: Time to Spend in the Victorian City’, in J. John (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 310–30. Nordau, M. ([1892] 1895), Degeneration [Entautung], London: William Heinemann. Rigal, L. and R. Rosenberg (2004), Liberal Judaism: The First Hundred Years, London: Liberal Judaism. Select Committee (1888), Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System (First Report), London: HMSO. Select Committee (1832), Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Observance of the Sabbath Day (Report), London: HMSO. Spence, J. (2004), ‘Working for Jewish Girls: Lily Montagu, Girls’ Clubs and Industrial Reform 1890–1914’, Women’s History Review, 13. 3: 491–509. Umansky, E. M. (2009), ‘Lily Montagu’, Jewish Women’s Archive, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/ article/montagu-lily Umansky, E. M. (ed.) (1985), Lily Montagu: Sermons, Addresses, Letters and Prayers, New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press. Umansky, E. M. (1983), Lily Montagu and the Advancement of Liberal Judaism: From Vision to Vocation, New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press. Workshop Regulation Act, 1867, Amendment (1871), House of Commons, London: HMSO. Wigley, J. (1980), The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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19 American Nervousness: Motherhood and ‘The Mental Activity of Women’ in the Era of Sexual Anarchy Emily Coit

I

n 1907, the president of Bryn Mawr College, M. Carey Thomas, addressed a meeting of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae. Speaking to women who, like herself, had been educated during the last decades of the nineteenth century, she recalled: The passionate desire of women of my generation for higher education was accompanied thruout [sic] its course by the awful doubt, felt by women themselves as well as by men, as to whether women as a sex were physically and mentally fit for it . . . I was always wondering whether it could be really true, as every one thought, that boys were cleverer than girls. Indeed, I cared so much that I never dared to ask any grown-up person the direct question, not even my father or mother, because I feared to hear the reply. I remember often praying about it, and begging God that if it were true that because I was a girl I could not successfully master Greek and go to college and understand things to kill me at once, as I could not bear to live in such an unjust world. (Thomas 1908: 64) She goes on to describe her youthful despair over the Bible’s account of women, and then the pains of more recent literature: ‘I read Milton with rage and indignation. Even as a child I knew him for the woman hater he was. The splendor of Shakespeare was obscured to me then by the lack of intellectual power in his greatest woman characters.’ The next book to move her to tears (as she is translating it) is Michelet’s La femme: ‘I was beside myself with terror lest it might prove true that I myself was so vile and pathological a thing’ (65). The very worst, though, was yet to come: Altho [sic] during these thirty years I had read in every language every book on women that I could obtain, I had never chanced again upon a book that seemed to me so to degrade me in my womanhood as the seventh and seventeenth chapters on women and women’s education, of President Stanley Hall’s Adolescence . . . I was terror-struck lest I, and every other woman with me, were doomed to life as pathological invalids in a universe merciless to women as a sex. (65–6)

This reference to Adolescence (1904) by Clark University president G. Stanley Hall opens an address in which Thomas evokes not just a long history of misogyny, but also a specific contemporary scientific and medical discourse about women’s bodies

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and minds. In this chapter, I consider the place of ideas from this discourse in short fiction by Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898). In doing so, I return to the site of foundational feminist scholarship on fin-de-siècle literature. While such scholarship often emphasised Wharton’s and Gilman’s resistance to this discourse, I examine their participation in it. My argument is that these short stories adopt, interrogate and ultimately affirm the idea that terrifies Thomas: a body that might bear children can’t quite safely undertake intellectual work. ‘We women’, Thomas reminds her audience, could not be sure until we had tried the experiment. Now we have tried it, and tried it for more than a generation, and we know that college women are not only not invalids, but that they are better physically than other women in their own class of life. (Thomas 1908: 69) She confesses, however, that this certainty is new: ‘We did not know when we began whether women’s health could stand the strain of college education’; citing Edward Clarke’s Sex in Education (1873), she admits: ‘we did not know whether colleges might not produce a crop of just such invalids. Doctors insisted that they would’ (69). Thomas names Clarke and Hall as key voices in this conversation, but their interlocutors are numerous. When Clarke makes his intervention during the early 1870s, Henry Maudsley echoes his argument in Britain; their ideas about the limited capacities of women’s bodies find further expression in the discussion of neurasthenia and associated nerve disorders, notably in the work of Silas Weir Mitchell and in George Miller Beard’s account of ‘American nervousness’ in his book by that title, published in 1881. Both men and women were diagnosed as neurasthenics, but the disease’s presumed causes and indicated treatments differed according to sex; in American Nervousness, Beard lists among the five features of modernity that cause the disease ‘the mental activity of women’ (Beard 1881: vi). Building upon Darwin’s and Spencer’s ideas about evolution and sexual difference, these medical experts participate in a discourse that – with varying degrees of qualification and ambivalence – posits a female body undertaking education at great peril. The nerve-force it uses in brain work and education will necessarily be drawn from limited reserves that must also support a reproductive system. The female who seeks out education thus risks depletion and illness, which in turn cause either sterility or a pathological motherhood that makes weak and sickly offspring. Because compromised reproductive capacity is the possible consequence of her overexertion, the risk she undertakes in seeking education is a risk she imposes upon her society and her race. As Kimberly A. Hamlin puts it in her recent study of Darwinian thought in Gilded Age America: ‘women going to college threatened to minimize sex differentiation, thwart evolutionary advancement, and diminish white racial superiority’ (Hamlin 2014: 73).1 Beard writes that ‘American nervousness, like American invention or agriculture, is at once peculiar and pre-eminent’ (Beard 1881: 13). As a disease distinctive of modernity and advanced civilisation, it marks the progress of the young nation; it is an affliction of the white elite, and, especially in its earlier years as a diagnosis, is rather fashionable (Schuster 2011; Scull 2009: 84–103). The broader ideas about nervous ailments in which Beard traffics are clearly not specific to the United States,

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however.2 As Elaine Showalter remarks in her study of the age of ‘sexual anarchy’: ‘the New Woman was a nervous woman’ (Showalter 1990: 40). Like the new woman herself, both the sexual anarchy that Showalter describes and the discourse around nerve disorders are fully transatlantic phenomena. In the United States, however, this discourse addresses some specifically American debates about race and immigration. Laura Briggs observes: when Edward Clarke wrote of the shriveling ovaries of educated women . . . he tapped into the same discourse that found expression in immigration restriction acts . . . The neurasthenic narrative shared with racist eugenics a concern about white women’s low birth rate and the fertility of non-white women. (Briggs 2000: 250)3 In the first decade of the twentieth century, rising alarm about ‘race suicide’ implicates the new woman, and within that diffuse category, the intellectual woman specifically. In the year following the publication of Thomas’s lecture, an academic study titled ‘College Women and Race Suicide’ echoes her sanguine message: ‘today, when thousands of women have been educated and the achievements of many of them have won general recognition, the intellectual equality of the sexes has ceased to be a burning issue’ (Emerick 1909: 280). But the study nevertheless undertakes to determine: ‘does collegiate training lessen the probability of marriage and maternity?’ The author states ‘the conclusion of this study is chiefly negative’, but undermines Thomas’s certainty and his own as he further notes ‘the higher education of women is too young for satisfactory statistical investigation . . . it is manifestly premature to collect statistics of marriages and births among college women . . . The problem does not admit of statistical determination’ (282–3). The self-contradicting ambivalence of this scholarly article is of less interest, however, than the way that it moves seamlessly from ‘the intellectual equality of the sexes’ to ‘probability of marriage and maternity’, as if these two topics are one and the same. Thomas makes the same elision when she speaks in one breath about ‘whether boys were cleverer than girls’ and whether women’s bodies are subject to ‘pathological invalidism’. These elisions replicate assumptions within the scientific discourse to which these writers respond. As Hamlin notes, ‘women’s intellectual capacities, according to Darwin and most other evolutionists, were permanently limited by their reproductive functions’. In this context, to discuss female intellect is also, necessarily, to discuss motherhood. And indeed, as Hamlin clarifies, in debates about women’s intellect and rights, as well as in discussions regarding the proper distribution of domestic and professional work, what people were really talking about was motherhood (actual or potential) and the extent to which it did, or should, determine every aspect of a woman’s life. (Hamlin 2014: 72, 96) It is not surprising, then, that Gilman’s and Wharton’s stories about intellectual women are also stories about mothering. Nor is it surprising that their stories grapple with the ideas about sexual difference and heredity that inform the elision of questions about women’s intellectual capacity with questions about their fertility. Crucial to theories of women’s intellectual inferiority are theories of how intelligence is passed down (or not) from generation to generation: in order for intellectual inferiority to

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be sex-specific, intelligence must be a sex-linked trait or an acquired trait. Discussing Darwin’s views on the sex-linked transmission of intelligence, Cynthia Eagle Russett observes: ‘on this critical issue it can only be said that Darwin waffled. Never doubting that men were brighter than women, he clearly had difficulty explaining how this could be so’ (Russett 1989: 81–2). Spencer had less difficulty. Nevertheless, Darwin’s waffle and the subsequent conversation about intelligence and heredity offer these writers (especially Wharton) rich material for plots, as does the larger medical discourse about women’s bodies and minds that grows out of Darwin’s and Spencer’s work. The neurasthenic woman is a key figure in that medical discourse. This figure received significant attention from the scholarship that fought to bring writers like Wharton and Gilman into the American literary canon. Thanks in large part to Gilman’s powerful account of her own ‘rest-cure’ treatment for neurasthenia under Mitchell in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892), the disease figures centrally in certain organising narratives of feminist authorship and feminist criticism. Gilman’s story and early feminist scholarship on it offer a picture of neurasthenia as a symptom of patriarchal oppression and Mitchell as a more or less brutal embodiment of patriarchal medicine. This account of neurasthenia offers a narrative about a silenced female author that also serves to describe the experience of Wharton and of Virginia Woolf, both of whom also received treatment for neurasthenia. For years, scholarship reported that Wharton, like Gilman, had been Mitchell’s patient, helping to perpetuate the narrative that shows these women authors immobilised and silenced by the rest cure until they break free and claim their voices as writers. This narrative supports a particular mode of feminist criticism, one that sees these authors writing feminist ideas which are in turn recovered or decoded by feminist critics. Rita Felski describes this mode and notes that it can produce nineteenth-century female authors who ‘sound remarkably like American feminists of the 1970s’ (Felski 2003: 67).4 The female author becomes a mirror image of the twentieth-century feminist critic; interest focuses on textual resistance against or complicity with oppressive discourse, and author and critic manifest resistance together. Scholarship in this feminist mode fundamentally changed both literary study and the professional environment in which it occurs: its work was crucial and its achievement massive. But the story of neurasthenia that it offers is not quite true. Today, we might be less inclined to observe that these women authors were treated for neurasthenia because of patriarchal oppression, and more inclined to observe that they had this experience because they were privileged white people, and thus fitted the profile of the racialised neurasthenic subject, a profile embedded in eugenic and imperialist logic. We are more ready to learn that Wharton was probably not in fact Mitchell’s patient, and that Gilman’s brilliant fictional polemic about her experience does not offer a full or accurate account of Mitchell’s medical practices, or of his views on women.5 But if we are more receptive to these ideas and arguments in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we should recognise that they are not new. As early as the late 1980s, the feminist neurasthenia narrative and the scholarship informed by it drew powerful critiques from within feminism.6 Especially in work on Wharton, however, the pace at which scholarship has begun to build upon the insights of that work has been slower than one might expect.7 In taking up Gilman’s and Wharton’s tales of intellectual women, this chapter returns to a formative site of feminist criticism – short fiction by women writers at the fin de siècle – and considers the two authors ‘who might be said’, as Frederick Wegener

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puts it, ‘almost to divide between them the legacy of American literary feminism in their time’, writers ‘so unalike and yet equally central’ (Wegener 2000a: 137). I try to avoid anachronistic thinking fostered by the morally charged binary of resistance and complicity, and instead seek to examine participation. Rather than examining neurasthenia in Gilman’s and Wharton’s biographies, I focus on the ways their writing thinks with ideas from the discourse of neurasthenia. These authors’ own embodied experiences as patients matter, but I am less interested in that experience and more interested in their work as thinkers, work richly informed by their mutual interest in science generally, and Darwin and Spencer in particular. Gilman’s and Wharton’s stories about intellectual women do not necessarily represent neurasthenia, and only glancingly represent institutionalised higher education for women; but the larger scientific discourse that defines neurasthenia is nevertheless an essential context for these texts. These authors’ acquaintance with that discourse explains why their stories about intellectual women should be so preoccupied with heredity and with motherhood.

Race, Intellect and Evolution: Gilman’s Mothering Bodies Gilman lays out in Women and Economics (1898) the ideas that will find expression in much of her subsequent work. In this influential, acclaimed and commercially successful book, she boldly reshuffles the elements of the conversation about evolution, race and heredity to offer a radically revised account of pathological mothering. She inverts the narrative that says women’s learning and work lead to the depletion of nerve-force which in turn leads to sterility or sickly offspring. Rather, she suggests, it’s the absence of learning and work that causes these problems. She proposes that the modern woman may in fact suffer neurasthenia because her evolved mind is tasked with an unevolved function. ‘It may be suggested’, she writes, ‘that one of the causes of “Americanitis” is this increasing nervous strain in family relation, acting especially upon woman’ (quoted in Wegener 1999: 155). Gilman’s central argument in Women and Economics is that humans, anomalously amongst animals, currently suffer from a ‘sexuo-economic’ relation between the sexes: because females depend entirely on males for their sustenance, they have evolved, through a process of sexual selection, for ‘sex-functions’ rather than ‘race functions’. In this context, all ‘race functions’ and ‘racial activities’ that avail towards the progress of the race, including all forms of learning and specialisation, are mistakenly understood as male rather than human. Rather than developing fully as paragons of advanced evolution, women have become deformed creatures dedicated exclusively to sex and sexual attractiveness – because it is only through sexual attractiveness that they can secure food and shelter. Women’s lack of economic independence thus effectively stalls evolution and causes racial decline. The course of evolution needs to be corrected, Gilman suggests, and the way to correct it is to allow women to claim their humanity by participating fully in ‘racial activity’. In Gilman’s account, the woman who fails at reproduction is not the college girl but the sex-object woman produced by the sexuo-economic relation: The more absolutely woman is segregated to sex-functions only, cut off from all economic use and made wholly dependent on the sex-relation as a means of livelihood, the more pathological does her motherhood become. The over-development of sex caused by her economic dependence on the male reacts unfavorably upon

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her essential duties. She is too female for perfect motherhood! Her excessive specialization in secondary sexual characteristics is a detrimental element in heredity. Small, weak, soft, ill-proportioned women do not tend to produce large, strong, sturdy, well-made men or women . . . The female segregated to the uses of sex alone naturally deteriorates in racial development, and naturally transmits that deterioration to her offspring. (Gilman 1998: 182–3) It is specifically leisured, white, middle-class and upper-class women that are most subject to this problem, Gilman suggests, for of course, women of other classes and races are typically not at all ‘cut off from economic use’: ‘the savage woman, the peasant woman, the working-woman everywhere who is not overworked’ are more able to fulfil ‘the primal physical functions of maternity’ (182). For the idle Anglo-Saxon female absent from this line-up of robust mothers, Gilman urges more work and more independence. Gilman contends that general blindness to the problem she describes is due to ‘modern mother-worship’ (1998: 176). She attacks this unthinking worship directly, instructing her readers: ‘consider not the rosy ideal of motherhood you have in your mind, but the coarse, hard facts of motherhood as you see them, and hear them, in daily life’ (185). Those who look at these hard facts clearly will see: the mother of a dead baby or the baby of a dead mother; the sick baby, the crooked baby, the idiot baby; the exhausted, nervous, prematurely aged mother, – these are not uncommon among us; and they do not show much progress in our motherhood. (183) The veneration of ‘instinct’, she argues, is misguided. ‘The record of untrained instinct as a maternal faculty in the human race is to be read on the rows and rows of little gravestones which crowd our cemeteries’; excluding women from training means that they rely on ‘instinct’ to raise their children, which results in ‘our present wasteful and grievous method, by which we lose fifty per cent. of them, like a codfish’ (160). Such blunt, strident statements in Gilman’s non-fiction find their counterpart in her fiction: she often expresses ideas about social ills and social reform in quite overt, transparent ways. The short story ‘An Unnatural Mother’ (1895) offers an example of this. The tale is essentially a transcription of small-minded women gossiping. They harshly judge one Esther Greenwood, now dead, for choosing to save three villages from death in a flood rather than saving her own child. It seems that when the floods threatened, instead of following the passion of maternal instinct, Esther acted in a rational and informed manner to help humanity. As the gossips see it: ‘A mother’s duty is to her own child! She neglected her own to look after other folks – the Lord never gave her them other children to care for!’ (Gilman 2009: 105–6). Also objectionable to the gossips is the way Esther was raised: her father let her run around outdoors, and made sure that she knew about sex when she was married. The story ridicules the destructive irrationality of the gossips while endorsing Esther’s father’s childrearing practices and Esther’s own collectivist approach to preventing the death of children and others. The ideas suggested in this story are even more fully illustrated in Gilman’s representation of motherhood in the all-female utopia of Herland (1915). In that utopia, children are raised by the whole community rather than being cared for

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exclusively by their biological mothers, and caring for children is understood to be specialised labour: those who undertake it do so with knowledge and ability. Women and Economics and ‘Unnatural Mother’ demonstrate that, as Russett observes, ‘Gilman had a talent for accepting the premises of men like Darwin and Spencer and exploding their perspectives to arrive at wickedly revolutionary conclusions’ (Russett 1989: 13). But her engagement with Darwin’s and Spencer’s ideas and the medical discourse informed by those ideas was not always strictly oppositional and revolutionary. Bederman notes that Gilman ‘never completely rejected the terms of the neurasthenic paradox, which posited womanly health as the opposite of intellectual achievement’ (Bederman 1995: 133). Her short story ‘Turned’ (1911) reflects this ongoing ambivalence. The story introduces us to the elegant household of Mr and Mrs Marroner and their maid Gerta Petersen. The third-person narration generally operates from within the consciousness of Mrs Marroner, and the plot is simple: Mr Marroner goes away on business, and through a mix-up of his letters home, it emerges that he is the one responsible for young Gerta’s pregnancy, which becomes evident in his absence. The story begins by setting out text and blank space graphically on the page in order to present a tableau comprised of two contrasting vignettes that juxtapose the lady of the house with her employee. The opening paragraph consists of a single sentence: ‘In her soft-carpeted, thick-curtained, richly furnished chamber, Mrs Marroner lay sobbing on the wide, soft bed’ (Gilman 2009: 172). Three further short paragraphs comprise the rest of this block of text on the page; a space indicating a section break follows. Then, the next section begins with another single-sentence paragraph: ‘In her uncarpeted, thin-curtained, poorly furnished chamber on the top floor, Gerta Petersen lay sobbing on the narrow, hard bed’ (172). The story thus begins by presenting these two women sobbing on their beds, each contained in a separate block of text on the page; in the spaces described by the text, they are walled off from each other, on different floors, in rooms defined by class. But class is just one element in this exercise in contrast. Mrs Marroner is thirtythree years old; she comes, we’re told, from ‘stern New England stock’, and has led a ‘reserved, superior, Boston-bred life’. She has a PhD and formerly taught at the institution where she received that degree (2009: 172). When she encounters this crisis in her life, she has, we’re told, the resources of ‘the training of the twenty-eight years which had elapsed before her marriage; the life at college, both as a student and a teacher; the independent growth which she had made’ (177). As she contemplates what her husband has done, she rises, Gilman writes, ‘to icy peaks of intellectual apprehension’ (178). Mrs Marroner’s resources form, the story comments, ‘a very different background for grief than that in Gerta’s mind’; the younger woman has ‘no antechamber to her mind, no trained forces to preserve order while agony entered’ (177, 176).8 Though Mrs Marroner has a great, trained mind of many chambers, the uneducated Gerta lacks that. What she has instead is an almost supernaturally splendid body. She is ‘of larger frame than her mistress, grandly built and strong’; ‘her braided wealth of dead-gold hair, her grave blue eyes, her mighty shoulders, and long, firmly moulded limbs seemed those of a primal earth spirit’; she comes into the Marroner’s home ‘like a meek young goddess’ (2009: 172, 173). This strong, large-limbed, golden goddess’s surname ‘Petersen’ would probably place her antecedents in Scandinavia or northern Europe, and thus make her ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in the sense that Gilman would

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understand it. This racial category plays an important role in Gilman’s thinking about sexual difference and racial progress. In Women and Economics, she declares the Anglo-Saxon blood, that English mixture of which Tennyson sings, – ‘Saxon and Norman and Dane though we be,’ is the most powerful expression of the latest current of fresh racial life from the north, – from those sturdy races where the women were more like men, and the men no less manly because of it. (Gilman 1998: 147) So although Gerta is of the lower classes and may indeed be an immigrant, she embodies the ‘fresh racial life from the north’, and thus that stock’s hearty blonde sturdiness, as well as its less pathologically exaggerated pattern of sex difference. As a housemaid, moreover, she is not ‘cut off from economic use’ and thus stands among those women not deformed by the sexuo-economic relation (‘the savage woman, the peasant woman, the working-woman everywhere who is not overworked’) who can fulfil ‘the primal physical functions of maternity’ (Gilman 2009: 182).9 Gerta’s strength in body is not matched by fortitude of mind, however. The obedient eighteen-year-old is, Mrs Marroner sees, ‘only an ignorant child, with a child’s weakness’; she’s effectively ‘a tall, rosy-cheeked baby; rich womanhood without, helpless infancy within’ (Gilman 2009: 173). Logically, Mrs Marroner plays educator to her young employee. She and her husband joke about ‘her laborious efforts to educate “the child” ’; as he’s leaving for his trip, he jibes, ‘I expect you’ll have her ready for college when I get back.’ This is a joke, however, precisely because Gerta is clearly not college material (174, 173). Mrs Marroner had tried to teach Gerta, and had grown to love the patient, sweet-natured child, in spite of her dullness . . . But to the woman who held a Ph.D., who had been on the faculty of a college, it was like baby-tending . . . Perhaps having no babies of her own made her love the big child the more. (174) The two women, then, have a relationship that’s structured by class difference, but also by a radically unequal distribution of physical and intellectual gifts. Within that unequal distribution, Mrs Marroner is the professional and the trained intellect, while Gerta is all healthy, rosy-cheeked physical womanhood. Mrs Marroner acts as a mother-teacher and Gerta acts as a child-student. This is disrupted when the housemaid becomes pregnant with a child of her own. Gerta is so fertile that she conceives even when she doesn’t want to; whereas Mrs Marroner, the text implies, has wanted to have a baby for some time, but has not conceived during the five years of her marriage – and clearly it’s not Mr Marroner whose ability to reproduce is in question. Having left her husband, Mrs Marroner sends him a note: ‘I have gone. I will care for Gerta. Good-bye. Marion’ (Gilman 2009: 180). This is when we first hear her given name. At the end of the story, Mr Marroner learns where his wife has gone: ‘she had resumed teaching under one of her old professors, lived quietly, and apparently kept boarders’ (180). We can see Gilman’s emphasis on the importance of female economic independence in the fact that, with her training, Mrs Marroner can work to earn a living when she needs to; this enables her to leave the husband who has committed ‘the sin of man against woman’, or, as she comes to see it, with mounting horror: ‘Against

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womanhood. Against motherhood. Against – the child’ (178). Mrs Marroner’s economic independence thus permits her to live out a kind of sexual purity feminism. When Mr Marroner goes to seek his wife in her new home, he asks the elderly servant who answers the door for ‘Mrs Marroner’. He’s told that the woman who lives here is one ‘Miss Wheeling’ – his wife is going by her maiden name. But the greater disruption of his intention here comes next: not one, but two women appear. The story’s conclusion, like its opening, operates by using a white space on the page to create an effect that is visual and physically dramatised: Through the wide doorway there came in to him two women. One like a tall Madonna, bearing a baby in her arms. Marion, calm, steady, definitely impersonal; nothing but a clear pallor to hint of her inner stress. Gerta, holding the child as a bulwark, with a new intelligence in her face, and her blue, adoring eyes fixed on her friend – not upon him. He looked from one to the other dumbly. And the woman who had been his wife asked quietly: ‘What have you to say to us?’ (Gilman 2009: 181) Thus the story ends. This conclusion renders the male silent and forges a new unity across the class divide that separates these women in the parallel tableau at the story’s opening. They have made their own little Herland in this college town: a utopian female household for cooperatively raising better people. Gerta is less beset by dullness, and her adoration is now directed at her female friend rather than her male seducer. She is a Madonna (a tall one), and her friend’s first name, in this context, has an echo of the Marian cult that worships that maternal figure. As Miss Wheeling, the fully employed college educator, Marion speaks for both of the two female bodies in the doorway. The story offers this triumphant narrative of cross-class solidarity between women who reject the exploitative, sexually incontinent male. The problems of innate and economic inequality are solved through gynocratic cooperation; the two women merge as one harmonious unit that both teaches at a college and raises a child. But the resolution forged by this solidarity participates in a eugenic fantasy of bigger, stronger, blonder female bodies reproducing while smaller (and more scholarly) female bodies don’t. This tableau at the end of the story might offer a statement about gynocratic cooperation, but it also offers a statement about the incompatibility of intellectual labour and motherhood. In spite of Gerta’s ‘new intelligence’, innate physical characteristics and abilities seem more or less fixed in this plot. The cooperative harmony of the story’s conclusion suggests that intellect and reproductive capacity cannot exist in one body: two women, not one, greet Mr Marroner at the threshold because there’s no other way to make the Madonna and the professor appear simultaneously. Although Women and Economics suggests that leisured Anglo-Saxon women should enter the world of work and education in order to be strong mothers, raise robust children and abet racial progress, ‘Turned’ envisions that ideal in a fragmented manner, locating reproduction in the already working, already robust lower-class Anglo-Saxon woman, and leaving the college girl who has matured into a teacher of college girls as barren as she ever was. Education and reproduction are still distributed across different bodies rather than undertaken by a single brave

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female protagonist. Gilman writes forcefully in Women and Economics: ‘There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of the female liver’ (Gilman 1998: 149). But ‘Turned’ suggests that even if the brain is not an organ of sex, the organs of sex may remain a problem for a woman who lives by her brain.

Being Pretty: Motherhood, Intellect and Agency in Wharton Wharton writes stories of New England college-town life that critique the arid, prudish rigidity of that milieu; the professors in these stories are male, and the college girl does not appear. Generally, her stories about intellectuals manifest awareness of the professionalisation under way at universities at the time they were written, as well as attendant questions about the consumer public’s relation with the work of professional scholars.10 Wharton herself was an autodidact whose learning took place outside institutions, but her social circle included prominent Harvard academics like Barrett Wendell and Charles Eliot Norton. Her stories about female intellectuals are not numerous, and they portray women working outside institutionalised academe. ‘The Angel at the Grave’ (1901) is the story of Paulina Anson, granddaughter of the philosopher Orestes Anson, presented in the tale as a luminary of the transcendental moment in the United States, and, less gloriously, as a somewhat tedious lesser contemporary of Emerson. The great Orestes ‘had left no son’, and his daughters are ‘not “intellectual” ’, showing a ‘congenital incapacity to understand what he had written’; it seems young Paulina is ‘the only person in the family who could read grandfather’s works’ (Wharton 2001: 255, 277). In spite of a proposal from ‘a young man to whom Paulina was primarily a kissable girl’, she rejects marriage and motherhood in order to dedicate her life to the philosopher’s house and papers, taking on the task of writing his biography (258). This sterile, bookish existence replicates motherhood figuratively, though, for Paulina is ‘the type of woman who transmutes thought into sensation and nurses a theory in her bosom like a child’ (258). The story tells us ‘she was forty when the book was completed’ – nearly past childbearing age (260). But her book has become a sort of ghostly soldier-son that never was: as she takes it off to the press, All her youth, all her dreams, all her renunciations lay in that neat bundle on her knee . . . the knowledge that it would come back to her in all the glorification of print was of no more help than, to a mother’s grief, the assurance that the lad she must part with will return with epaulets. (260) When the publisher rejects the manuscript as obsolete and outmoded, she returns home ‘carrying the manuscript like a wounded thing’ (261). A dark time follows, but then, suddenly, another ‘young man’ appears at the house; he is modern and scholarly, and ‘his scientific jargon was as bewildering as his slang’ to Paulina (Wharton 2001: 267). While she has spent her whole life studying Orestes’s work only to produce an unpublishable doorstop, this young man will be the author of a brilliant scholarly coup: he has identified a field-changing insight buried in the philosopher’s juvenilia on zoological subjects. Paulina has always known of this work, but found it ‘unintelligible’ and never recognised it as significant (268). Overwhelmed, Paulina tells the young man of her life’s work on the philosopher: ‘I gave up everything . . . to keep him alive . . . I nursed his glory in my bosom and it died.’ The young man

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reassures her: ‘Don’t you see it’s your love that has kept him alive . . . if your wonderful tenderness hadn’t perpetually kept guard – this might have been – must have been – irretrievably lost’ (269). The story thus again figures Paulina’s scholarly work as maternal nursing and defines it as the provision of ‘love’ and ‘tenderness’. This Angel at the Grave is an Angel in the House: her care for the philosopher’s papers is like the care of any good domestic female. In her bookish life, her work is still the work of a mother, and her most important function is to nurse papers tenderly (and uncomprehendingly) during the interval of their passage from man to man. Paulina’s tale is, among other things, a story about heredity: it ambiguously dramatises the sort of sex-linked transmission described by Spencer. Wharton draws from the scientific conversation about women’s bodies and minds by making the sex-linked transmission of traits a quiet question in her plot: the male philosopher’s female children have a ‘congenital’ inability to read what he’s written, and his granddaughter seems to share this incapacity (Wharton 2001: 255). Whether by sex-linked transmission or some other mechanism, the old man’s intellectual inheritor is the young man, rather than his own female progeny. Paulina’s female role is thus to serve as a passive assistant to the active males, who perceive, think and discover. As the story ends, the young man asks Paulina to assist him in his work, and, we are told, ‘when she turned back into the empty room she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips’ (Wharton 2001: 270). The first young man, who understood Paulina as a ‘kissable girl’, met rejection, but the second young man puts the flush back in her lips. The sexy touch of youth in these last lines culminates a pattern of reference to natural cycles of life and death that runs throughout the story. When Paulina is considering the temptation of the first young man’s proposal, the narrator compares her to Persephone staring into the underworld she will enter as a bride; his love is ‘an embodiment of the perpetual renewal which to some tender spirits seems a crueler process than decay’, and his disregard for Paulina’s scholarly commitments is ‘as much a natural function as the falling of leaves on a grave’ (259).11 Later, the narrator observes that the decline of Orestes’s reputation had taken place as slowly and imperceptibly as a natural process. [Paulina] could not say that any ruthless hand had stripped the leaves from the tree: it was simply that, among the evergreen glories of his group, her grandfather’s had proved deciduous. Paulina wonders: ‘If the decay had been a natural process, was it now the very pledge of renewal?’ (262–3). ‘Renewal’, ‘decay’, ‘natural’ processes and the image of falling leaves thus haunt both Paulina’s abortive courtship and her intellectual work, linking her renunciation of marriage and motherhood with her sterile scholarly existence through a shared pattern of imagery. Wharton’s story about a woman who gives her life to books is seeded with this language about sex, death and the natural cycles of decay and new birth; and its account of Paulina’s work in philosophical biography features not just her flushed, kissable lips but that bundle on her lap, the thing she nurses in her bosom. The story thus replicates the logic of the scientific discourse about women’s intellectual capacities and reproductive capacities by effectively making these two subjects synonymous. Wharton represents female intellectual life as the medical discourse often describes it: sterile and haunted by lost sexual attractiveness and lost motherhood.

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Needless to say, bookish Paulina’s sterility seems to be the sterility of New England stock not too dissimilar from Mrs Marroner’s stern antecedents; her Emersonian grandfather locates her in that milieu. For both Gilman and Wharton, it would seem, New England helps to figure a racial purity threatened by failure to reproduce. We can identify Paulina as another product of what Jennie A. Kassanoff describes as a ‘decadent fantasy of oligarchical wholeness’ in her reading of Wharton’s Lily Bart as a ‘site of racial elegy’ whose story is told ‘in language of eugenic preservationism’. If, as Kassanoff convincingly argues, Wharton’s portrait of Lily draws from the ‘discourses of racial nativism and aesthetic decadence’ that see perfection at the moment just before death, her portrait of Paulina draws from the medical discourses that see a nervous white woman studying herself into sterility (Kassanoff 2004: 56–7). The two very different childless female characters represent two ways of imagining Anglo-Saxon extinction. The intellectual woman in Wharton’s ‘The Pelican’ (1898), Mrs Amyot, grew up in a ‘New England university town’ and may indeed be of the same Anglo-Saxon stock, but she does bear a child: a son, and not a merely ghostly one like Paulina’s. A young widow, she is apparently required to be ‘intellectual’ and give lectures for a living in order to care for her boy; but the end of the story reveals that actually, for most of the time, she was being ‘intellectual’ not, as she proclaimed, ‘for the baby’ but – scandalously – because she wanted to. Like Gilman’s work, the story takes elements of neurasthenic discourse and reshuffles them: rather than portraying ‘the mental activity of women’ as a cause of nerve disorders that compromise reproduction, this plot makes the circumstance of motherhood the occasion for ‘mental activity’ by a woman (Beard 1881: vi; Wharton 2001: 76). Critics agree that the narrator of ‘The Pelican’ is an educated male and that he thinks Mrs Amyot is both pretty and stupid, but there has been some disagreement about how we ought to read his voice and interpret his views.12 As will be evident, I read this narrator as an arch and witty gentleman with whom we’re invited to dally and chuckle, and I do not see the story distance itself from the condescension he manifests towards Mrs Amyot. Indeed, the humour and interest of the story depend on our accepting the narrator’s invitation to join him in that condescension. In a manner entirely consistent with Wharton’s published and unpublished writing elsewhere, the story expresses a harsh, misogyny-tinged disdain for women intellectuals who bring their intellect into the public realm. The story’s title has been read in different ways; though the idea of the bird who feeds its young with its own blood is relevant here, I would suggest that this title also functions to announce female education as a central concern. In her historical study of higher education for women in America, Barbara Solomon notes that college women appeared to each other in many guises: the lady scholar, the curious thinker, the cultivated dilettante, the ‘pelican’ (older school-marm), the effervescent flirt, the ‘butterfly’, the all-American girl, the earnest ‘dig’, and the striving outsider from an immigrant or black family. (Solomon 1985: 94) The story thus offers in its title an image that figures both maternal sacrifice and a particular type of female educator located in the contemporary landscape of higher education for women. Having pointed towards this landscape in its title, the story then opens

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by posing a set of questions about heredity and innate traits promptly in its opening paragraphs, which deliver a confusing mix of vocabularies about determination: She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic problem. I don’t think nature had meant her to be ‘intellectual;’ but what can a poor thing do, whose husband has died of drink when her baby is hardly six months old . . . ? Her mother, the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt, had written a poem in blank verse on ‘the Fall of Man;’ one of her aunts was dean of a girls’ college; another had translated Euripides – with such a family, the poor child’s fate was sealed in advance. The only way of paying her husband’s debts and keeping the baby clothed was to be intellectual; and, after some hesitation as to the form her mental activity was to take, it was unanimously decided that she was to give lectures. (Wharton 2001: 76) The story refers to the determining forces of ‘providence’ and ‘fate’, but also, contradictorily, to ‘nature’ and female antecedents. These references to family are themselves ambiguous, possibly gesturing to heredity and inherited innate traits, or possibly to behaviours that are passed down but not innate. The distinction between the innate and the acquired also perhaps hovers here in the distinction the narrator makes between ‘outward attributes’ and ‘intrinsic quality’, or ‘the real thing’. This opening thus gives readers mixed signals about which paradigm for determination applies in the fictional universe of the story: it poses questions about whether or not intelligence and intellectual habits are hereditary traits biologically determined, and if so, how exactly the mechanism for transmission might operate. All this is implicit, embedded quietly in the patterns of diction that the narrator uses. His explicit subject is Mrs Amyot’s prettiness. Throughout the story, the narrator remains preoccupied with this topic and with his own susceptibility to Mrs Amyot’s physical charms; as the opening of the story shows, it is quite literally the first thing he addresses. ‘Is she as pretty as ever?’ he asks later, and then observes for himself: she is ‘as pretty as ever’ (Wharton 2001: 76, 79). He fixates throughout the story on a particular dimple on her face. His early relationship with her is one in which he competes with ‘two or three learned gentlemen . . . rivals’ for the right to walk her home; he notes that she ‘[does] not often walk home alone’. During this walk, having won out over those rivals, he enjoys her charms, which consist of ‘sham erudition and real teeth and hair’ (77). The narrator is quite susceptible to those bodily charms, those teeth, that hair, and Mrs Amyot deploys them, along with that dimple, to manipulate him into helping her with her lectures. ‘My fetish of intellectual integrity went down like a ninepin’, he confesses, ‘before the appeal of a woman no longer young and distinctly foolish, but full of those dear contradictions and irrelevancies that will always make flesh and blood prevail against a syllogism’ (85). The narrator doesn’t simply objectify Mrs Amyot; he manifests a politely wolfish sexuality. This is an account of desire figured in teeth and hair and flesh and blood;

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and this primal note is extended when the narrator later tells us that he and another man are prevailed upon to buy lecture tickets by a young lady ‘with the smile which is the feminine equivalent of beads to savages’ (2001: 87). The narrator’s savage male sexuality is matched by Mrs Amyot’s manipulation of that sexuality: she repeatedly uses her charms to secure his assistance. The story suggests, moreover, that her lecturing is merely another site for this kind of manipulation. The narrator observes that ‘Mrs Amyot’s art was simply an extension of coquetry: she flirted with her audience’, and notes that the deployment of the dimple is a part of her routine at the podium (80). Her lecturing, then, is part of her general strategy for trying to claim power from her non-subject position as a sexual object, which is to be seen and to attract. In this relation to her audiences and to the narrator, she conforms to Gilman’s account of woman in the sexuo-economic relation. The narrator’s comment about her ‘dear irrelevancies and contradictions’ suggests that her weak mind is actually part of her sexual allure. Her sole means of securing food, shelter or indeed anything at all is to be ‘pretty’, and to play upon those attracted by her prettiness. In working to earn her living, she would seem to be doing exactly what Gilman recommends women do to escape the sexuo-economic relation. But in fact, her work as a lecturer merely provides new venues and new audiences for her performance of ‘sex-functions’. Also in keeping with Gilman’s critique is the way that Mrs Amyot’s excessive dedication to sex-functions makes her a bad mother. Her child’s name is Lancelot, and, as the narrator notes, ‘he would have preferred to be called Billy, and to hunt cats with the other boys on the block: his curls and his poetry were simply another outlet for Mrs Amyot’s irresistible coquetry’ (2001: 81). Just as coquetry is all she’s capable of as a lecturer, it’s all she’s capable of as a mother. Near the end of the story, Lancelot appears as an adult. He has chopped off his poetic curls and grown a beard, and is, in fact, the man with the narrator when he encounters that girl with the smile that’s like beads to savages. Lancelot turns out to be a bit of a Billy after all, in spite of his mother’s best efforts. The last several pages of the story consist largely of his extended excoriation of his mother, which functions as a forceful assertion of masculinity. He refuses, he says, to allow anyone to go on thinking . . . that a cent of their money has ever gone into my pockets since I was old enough to shift for myself. . . . No decent man is going to sit down under that sort of thing. It’s enough to ruin his character. He continues: Good God, mother! . . . What did you do it for? Haven’t you had everything you wanted ever since I was able to pay for it? Haven’t I paid you back every cent you spent on me when I was in college? Have I ever gone back on you since I was big enough to work? (2001: 93) Lancelot’s mother’s lie imposes on him the slur that he doesn’t work and thus has been an economic dependent rather than an independent breadwinner upon whom females depend. That, as he says, is not decent for a man. In proclaiming the truth at the end of the story, he asserts a masculinity grounded in work, in manfully shifting for oneself. In doing so, he evokes a brotherhood in which even the somewhat dilettantish narrator

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apparently belongs: immediately before Lancelot appears in the tale, the narrator complains that his doctor has told him to go on vacation, ‘one of the worst punishments a worker can undergo’, thus defining himself as another man who works (86). Mrs Amyot’s error has been to claim the masculine prerogative of work, and merge it with her responsibilities as a mother. That claim, the story shows, is based on a lie; just like her ‘sham erudition’, her stated need for economic independence is a ruse. Whether her erudition is really a sham has been questioned: Carol Singley argues that ‘closer reading reveals that it is the male narrator who creates the impression that Mrs. Amyot is foolish’, and suggests that the story functions to critique his condescending perspective. Like Olin-Ammentorp, I find abundant evidence in the text for Mrs Amyot’s actual vapidity, and see no reason why the narrator’s condescension should preclude her being stupid (Singley 1995: 49; Olin-Ammentorp 1999: 86). As I read it, the story endorses and even glorifies the narrator’s condescension, making it the basis for all the pleasant wit on offer. But I want to suggest that ‘The Pelican’ does more than offer the pleasures of that wit: it also proposes a specific relationship between the narrator’s mode of perceiving Mrs Amyot and Mrs Amyot’s intellectual incompetence. After the first instance in which our narrator hears Mrs Amyot’s lecture, she gushes to him, he tells us, ‘she knew, of course, how dreadfully learned I was’ and confides that when she had heard he would be in attendance, ‘she had felt ready to sink through the floor’. But then, she says: she had remembered Emerson’s line – wasn’t it Emerson’s? – that beauty is its own excuse for seeing, and that had made her feel a little more confident, since she was sure that no one saw beauty more vividly than she – as a child she used to sit for hours gazing at an Etruscan vase on the book-case in the library, while her sisters played with their dolls – and if seeing beauty was the only excuse one needed for talking about it, why, she was sure I would make allowances and not be too critical and sarcastic. (2001: 78) Mrs Amyot’s anticipation that the narrator may be ‘critical and sarcastic’ is perhaps the greatest sign of intelligence that she shows in the entire story. His direct reportage of her words here participates in that sarcasm, for Mrs Amyot is getting her Emerson wrong. What Emerson actually says, in the poem ‘The Rhodora’, is: ‘if eyes were made for seeing / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being’. As Olin-Ammentorp observes, Mrs Amyot’s garbling is not inconsequential: ‘she has substantially altered the meaning of Emerson’s line to justify her own inaccuracies, her own impressionistic approach to knowledge’ (Olin-Ammentorp 1999: 86). I would suggest, however, that the new statement accidentally produced by this reordering of Emerson’s words serves to justify much more than shoddy scholarship. When Mrs Amyot proclaims that ‘beauty is its own excuse for seeing’ and ‘seeing beauty is the only excuse one needed for talking about it’, she neatly expresses the logic that governs the narrator’s perception of herself throughout the story. Because she is beautiful, it is right and assumed that he will take the role of seeing, ‘talking’ subject, and she will take role of seen object, of beauty. Her beauty naturally makes him the agent and her the object; in keeping with Gilman’s account of the sexuo-economic relation, her only mode of agency, paradoxically, is to be even more of an object, deploying her dimple to win his assistance.

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In the poem that Mrs Amyot mangles here, a loquacious speaker addresses a wordless flower: the Universe brings them together in a way that lets this speaker see this beauty, and, it’s implied, make this poem. This is a paradigm we know well: the active, seeing artist contemplates the passive, unseeing beautiful object in order to make art. Mrs Amyot further evokes this paradigm when she mentions staring in ecstasy at the beauty of ‘the Etruscan vase’, bringing Keats into the picture along with his canonical example of the artist gazing at the beautiful object in order to make art. Emerson is talking about the beauty of nature that a divine power makes; Keats is talking about a beauty that is truth. The idiotic Mrs Amyot’s error in quotation disrupts all this. Her conflation of the verbs ‘being’ and ‘seeing’ points to the difference between passive object and seeing subject, and evokes a tradition in which those roles tend to be gendered. The male gaze is always entitled to look upon beauty; beauty gives it a reason to see, to look, and thus to objectify. Her fumbling evocation of both the Emerson and the Keats desecrates both of those works, bringing their solemn tones into the realm of the comic and the travestied. One of the ways it does this is by troubling the boundary between the beauty evoked in these poems with the beauty that is sexual attractiveness. In this story, the beauty that’s an excuse for seeing is not an ancient vase or a perfect flower, but the prettiness that stirs our narrator’s savage blood. If we were to push this travestying farther, we would note that the logic of agency implied in ‘beauty is its own excuse for seeing’ is also the logic behind many forms of sexual harassment and violence. Mrs Amyot tries be the seeing, agent subject, and tries to talk about what she sees; she fails because she is irremediably a seen object of beauty herself, and really capable of no more than that. Her comical awkwardness is an awkwardness that comes from the problem of being an object when she should be a subject, or being a subject when she should be an object. This has long been recognised as a problem for the female artist. (It should be noted that for Wharton, at this time, artistic and intellectual production are closely linked: her first novel is a work of historical research.) Later, Wharton would write in her memoir: ‘I had been fed on beauty since my babyhood . . . my love of pretty things – pretty clothes, pretty pictures, pretty sights’ (quoted in Wegener 2000a: 137). ‘The Pelican’ stages the problem of being that prettiness and attempting at the same time to feed on it: when the seen object attempts to adopt a seeing gaze, she becomes ridiculous. The story dramatises this without arguing against it or suggesting any alternative.

Conclusion: Women’s Bodies Now ‘Pretty’ is a key word in an article about Wharton by Jonathan Franzen published in the New Yorker in 2012. Franzen opens a paragraph describing Wharton’s poor performance in the marriage market and subsequent sex life by noting that, although we might resent her for her wealth and her privileged imperiousness, she ‘did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty’ (Franzen 2012: 60). He goes on to consider Wharton’s life and work in the light of her ostensible sexual unattractiveness, stating that she ‘might be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy’ (Franzen 2012: 62). Predictably, Franzen was criticised for his factual inaccuracy; for his dismissiveness towards Wharton’s work; for his attention to her physical appearance; for his general

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implication that bad or infrequent sex in a marriage may be the result of the woman’s ‘looks’, and that a successful marriage is predicted by a woman having ‘good looks’; and also for his apparent distaste at the idea of a woman in her forties having sex (Franzen 2012: 60, 62). In the narration of ‘The Pelican’, Wharton portrays this kind of reaction to a female: a reaction that takes for granted that a frank assessment of the degree to which she’s sexually attractive or not is part of the procedure of encountering her. Franzen’s ‘she wasn’t pretty’ provides an ironic echo of the opening line of ‘The Pelican’, in which the narrator’s very first order of business is to tell us ‘she was very pretty’, and his article’s continued attention to Wharton’s ‘looks’ and sex life provides an ironic echo of the narrator’s continued attention to Mrs Amyot’s physicality and desirability, as well as his careful monitoring of her ageing into pathetic unprettiness (Franzen 2012: 60: Wharton 2001: 76). If we choose to read Wharton’s portrayal of this mode as a critique that applies to the New Yorker piece about herself, that critique is neither uncanny nor proleptic, because Franzen participates in a way of perceiving women that was of course common in her own time. This is the mode of perceiving women that Gilman describes in her account of the sexuo-economic relation. Indeed, in implying that a woman’s sexual attractiveness (or ‘good looks’) is a crucial contribution to the success of her marriage, Franzen expresses the central idea of precisely the system that Gilman argues against. A woman selected for ‘good looks’, Gilman would say, may be a feeble mother who will hinder racial progress. The racist, eugenic core of Gilman’s turn-of-the-century feminism makes it all the more troubling to find elements of her critique still directly relevant in our own time. Although the author of the study on ‘College Women and Race Suicide’ stated that ‘the intellectual equality of the sexes has ceased to be a burning issue’, over a century later there is still much to say about the limitations placed on the work of women’s minds by their bodies (Emerick 1909: 280). The eminent historian of women’s higher education Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz declared with alarm in 2008: ‘once again the body has returned as a key determinant of women’s destiny’ (Horowitz 2008: 11). Horowitz’s broadly relevant comment might address current questions about, for example, American maternity leave policies – but it seems to have been prompted specifically by Harvard University president Lawrence Summers’s comments of 2005 about innate differences in intellectual ability between men and women.13 Casual remarks like Summers’s provoke anger because they threaten to reproduce in today’s girls the fear and doubt described by M. Carey Thomas; and because this kind of casual speech is what quietly, continuously constructs the always-evolving apparatus with which we perceive any given individual. The definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ (and marriage and motherhood and fatherhood) remain in flux: these concepts cohere and solidify primarily in use, in the ways that people talk and write about them. So language matters, and narratives matter; no casual remark, no theory proposed and no story told avoids participating in this ongoing construction of meaning. In participation with the scientific discourse of their time, Gilman’s and Wharton’s stories construct a female whose reproductive body can’t be an intellectual body; whose status as a passive object denies her the agency of a seeing, discovering subject; and whose decision to claim agency and exercise intellect renders her sterile and imperils her race. These ideas about women’s bodies and minds will seem antiquated. But the era of sexual anarchy from which they emerge is not over yet.

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Notes 1. See also Hamlin (2014: 69–78). For further accounts of this discourse see Horowitz (2008); Russett (1989); and Bederman (1995) on Hall. As these accounts show, the ideas I discuss met resistance and revision in their own time. 2. On the new woman, reproduction and race in the British context, see Ledger (2002: 17–19, 69–71) and Richardson (2003). 3. Lovett (2007: 91–5) also discusses ideas about women’s education in the conversation about ‘race suicide’. 4. Felski (2003: 64–71) echoes elements of Anderson’s argument about ‘aggrandized agency’; for accounts of this debate that discuss Gilman, see also Hamlin (2014: 19–20) and Seitler (2008: 177–8). 5. On Wharton’s neurasthenia, see Lee (2007: 79–81); on Mitchell, see Blackie (2004) and Schuster (2005). 6. Lanser (1989) pointed to lacunae around race in criticism on ‘Yellow Wallpaper’ in 1989; in the mid-1990s, Dock et al. (1996) criticised feminist scholarship all too eager to find ideas like its own in Gilman’s work; and Bederman’s (1995) study of gender in turn-of-thecentury America showed that Gilman’s racism was absolutely integral to her feminism. In Wharton studies, Olin-Ammentorp wrote in 1988 about ‘the limitations, or perhaps blindspots, of current feminist literary criticism’, in its implication ‘that Wharton, though never one to ally herself with the feminist movements of her day, was a kind of inherent feminist’ (Olin-Ammentorp 1988: 237); Tuttleton (1989) made a similar but more hostile argument in the following year. 7. For more recent work on Gilman that pushes this conversation forward, see Seitler (2008: 175–198) and Thrailkill (2002). On Wharton, see Wegener (1999; 2000a), Singley (2003) and Kassanoff (2004). 8. Wegener notes that in 1894 Gilman reviews (negatively) the story in which Wharton famously uses this architectural metaphor for a woman’s mind; see Wegener (2000a: 135–6). 9. See Briggs (2000 259–61) on the inclusion of working-class, poor and immigrant women in the category of ‘savages’ (along with African Americans, Asians and Latin Americans) who are not as susceptible to neurasthenia and thus more fertile. 10. See ‘The Pretext’ and ‘The Descent of Man’. 11. Whitehead considers Wharton’s use of the Persephone myth in this story and others, noting that ‘Wharton’s Persephone stories all deal with material inheritance . . . In each case, the woman’s material gain is inextricably tied to her loss, mirroring the paradox of Persephone’ (2010: 18). 12. See Kaplan (1988: 72–3); Olin-Ammentorp (1988: 999, 84–9); Singley (1995: 49). 13. Summers seems to have been speculating about ideas related to ‘variability’ dependent on sex. On the history of these ideas, see Russett (1989: 92–100).

Works Cited Anderson, A. (2006), ‘The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity’, in A. Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory, Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 46–66. Beard, G. (1881), American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Bederman, G. (1995), Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blackie, M. (2004), ‘Reading the Rest Cure’, Arizona Quarterly, 60. 2: 57–85.

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Briggs, L. (2000), ‘The Race of Hysteria: “Overcivilization” and the “Savage” Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology’, American Quarterly, 50. 2: 246–73. Clarke, E. (1873), Sex in Education, or, A Fair Chance for Girls, Boston: Osgood. Dock, J. B., D. R. Allen, J. Palais and K. Tracy (1996), ‘“But one expects that”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the Shifting Light of Scholarship’, PMLA, 111. 1: 52–65. Emerick, C. F. (1909), ‘College Women and Race Suicide’, Political Science Quarterly, 24. 2: 269–83. Felski, R. (2003), Literature after Feminism, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Franzen, J. (2012), ‘A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy’, New Yorker, 13 and 20 February: 60–5. Gilman, C. P. (2009), The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories, ed. R. Shulman, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilman, C. P. ([1898] 1998), Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, London: University of California Press. Hall, G. S. (1904), Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, 2 vols, New York: Appleton. Hamlin, K. A. (2014), From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horowitz, H. L. (2008), ‘The Body in the Library’, in A. M. May (ed.), The ‘Woman Question’ and Higher Education: Perspectives on Gender and Knowledge Production in America, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 11–31. Kaplan, A. (1988), The Social Construction of American Realism, London: University of Chicago Press. Kassanoff, J. A. (2004), Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lanser, S. S. (1989), ‘Feminist Criticism, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the Politics of Color in America”, Feminist Studies, 15. 3: 415–41. Ledger, S. (2002), The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lee, H. (2007), Edith Wharton, New York: Knopf. Lovett, L. L. (2007), Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Olin-Ammentorp, J. (1999), ‘Female Models and Male Mentors in Wharton’s Early Fiction’, in I. C. G. Price and M. M. Pennell (eds), American Literary Mentors, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, pp. 84–95. Olin-Ammentorp, J. (1988), ‘Edith Wharton’s Challenge to Feminist Criticism’, Studies in American Fiction, 16. 2: 237–44. Richardson, A. (2003), Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, New York: Oxford University Press. Russett, C. E. (1989), Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood, London: Harvard University Press. Schuster, D. G. (2011), Neurasthenic Nation: America’s Search for Health, Happiness, and Comfort, 1869–1920, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Schuster, D. G. (2005), ‘Personalizing Illness and Modernity: S. Weir Mitchell, Literary Women, and Neurasthenia, 1870–1914’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 79. 4: 695–722. Scull, A. (2009), Hysteria: The Disturbing History, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seitler, D. (2008), Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Showalter, E. (1990), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London: Virago.

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Singley, C. J. (2003), ‘Race, Culture, Nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan’, Twentieth Century Literature, 49. 1: 32–45. Singley, C. J. (1995), Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solomon, B. M. (1985), In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America, London: Yale University Press. Thomas, M. C. (1908), ‘Present Tendencies in Women’s College and University Education’, Educational Review, January: 64–84. Thrailkill, J. F. (2002), ‘Doctoring “The Yellow Wallpaper” ’, ELH, 69. 2: 525–66. Tuttleton, J. W. (1989), ‘The Feminist Takeover of Edith Wharton’, New Criterion, 7. 7: 6–14. Wegener, F. (2000a), ‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, and the Divided Heritage of American Literary Feminism’, in C. J. Golden and J. S. Zangrando (eds), The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, London: Associated University Presses, pp. 135–57. Wegener, F. (2000b), ‘“Rabid imperialist”: Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction’, American Literature, 72. 4: 783–812. Wegener, F. (1999), ‘Form, “Selection,” and Ideology in Edith Wharton’s Antimodernist Aesthetic’, in C. Colquitt, S. Goodman and C. Waid (eds), A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton, London: Associated University Presses, pp. 116–38. Wharton, E. (2001), Collected Stories 1891–1910, New York: Library of America. Whitehead, S. (2010), ‘Demeter Forgiven: Wharton’s Use of the Persephone Myth in her Short Stories’, Edith Wharton Review, 26. 1: 17–25.

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IV. Identities: Male

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20 German and British Sexual Sciences Across Disciplines at the Fin de Siècle: ‘Homosexuals’, ‘Inverts’ and ‘Uranians’ Ina Linge

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n his now famous History of Sexuality series, Michel Foucault discusses the emergence of a Western concept of sexuality during the nineteenth century. It is during the second half of the century, he argues, that sex began to be put into dominant discourses, notably those of science and medicine. This ‘discursification’ of sex in turn marked a shift in the understanding of homosexuality. It was now no longer understood as an act of varying moral depravity, but as a subject position, not just an act someone does, but a definition (and an expectation) of what someone is. Foucault credits the scientific discussion of sexual expression and behaviour, the emergence of a science of sex, as a driving force for this new discourse of sexuality: The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. . . . We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized – Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on ‘contrary sexual sensations’ can stand as its date of birth – less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (Foucault 1998: 4)

Foucault’s study was of monumental influence, so much so that the critic David Halperin considers his work as marking out an entirely new era in the study of the history of sexuality (Halperin 1990: 4). Certainly Foucault’s discussion has been invaluable to the recognition of the sexual sciences as instrumental to late nineteenth-century understandings of the queer body and psyche. Yet his exploration of homosexuality as a medico-scientific category glosses over the more intricate and interdisciplinary connections beyond medicine that arise as part of what we might call the ‘scientification’ or Verwissenschaftlichung of homosexuality leading up to the fin de siècle.1 Foucault points out that the publications of the German physician Carl Westphal initiated the moment at which the ‘homosexual’ became a person of medical interest. However, Westphal did not coin the term ‘homosexuality’; rather the term he used was ‘conträre

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Sexualempfindung’, literally contrary sexual feeling, which was later translated as ‘sexual inversion’. Although during the fin de siècle, ‘sexual inversion’ and ‘homosexuality’ had become near synonyms, each had its own story of origin. And these stories, which will – amongst other things – be explored in this chapter, quite clearly show that Foucault’s analysis of homosexuality as primarily a ‘psychological, psychiatric, medical category’ is incomplete. Theories of inversion and homosexuality certainly boomed in the medical field at this time, but the impulses that characterised these terms were, most often, not medical at all. In Germany and Britain, sexological research was never a solely scientific discipline but always drew on neighbouring discourses. Kate Fisher and Jana Funke (2015), for example, have examined the cultural, historical and disciplinary transgressions that influenced British sexual science beyond the medical field. 2 Likewise Heike Bauer (2009) has traced the profound influence which non-medical women and men writers had on the development and translation of sexological thinking. Anna Katharina Schaffner (2012) has examined developing sexological debates in various European countries, revealing the use of literary sources as case studies and tracing what she terms ‘the intellectual history of perversion theories’ (19). More specifically, Robert Deam Tobin’s recent study Peripheral Desires (2015) shows how it was literary writings at the periphery of the German-speaking world that brought forth the German discovery of sex. Indeed it was in Germany that the term Sexualwissenschaft, which is often translated as sexology, or sexual science(s),3 was coined by Iwan Bloch, a German dermatologist who also discovered the manuscripts of the Marquis de Sade. Bloch’s sexological writing combined scientific and cultural perspectives, with works published in literary history and cultural anthropology. Bloch’s Sexualwissenschaft is a difficult word to translate, as Wissenschaft in the German-speaking countries does not just refer to the more narrow term ‘science’, but is more akin to a scholarly and systematic study of a field of knowledge. Thus Wissenschaft can refer in equal measures to the arts and humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), the social sciences (Sozialwissenschaften) and the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). As will be seen, both German and British sexological efforts at the fin de siècle encapsulate this interdisciplinary understanding of sexuality. The fin de siècle was a time during which the exchange between the sciences, literature, art and history was in full flow. It is here that ‘art and politics, culture and science are profoundly, symbiotically interconnected, a period which sees a vitality of language, an exuberance of creativity generated by the end of the century which belies the very concept of endings’ (Marshall 2007: 11). We might at first expect the sexual sciences to be more closely tied to the more pessimistic debates and controversies pertinent to fin-de-siècle culture and society: degeneration, sexual disease, the end of reproduction and the deconstruction of heteronormativity. Yet the sexual sciences also embody precisely the opposite traits. Rather than heralding an end, the dissolving of history in inertia, loss and destruction – a decadent wasting of life on frivolous matters – sexual sciences can be more fruitfully viewed as a productive force concerned with social justice, not turned towards endings, but opened to a broad field of interdisciplinary discussions, seeking connections with literature and the arts, among others.4 In this chapter, I want to give a summary overview of the ways in which sexology at the turn of the century was a time of transition, using the British and German context to illustrate this intellectual openness, which operated between nations, disciplines, genres and media. More particularly, I will show how the figures of the ‘Uranian’,

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‘homosexual’ and ‘invert’ emerged from interdisciplinary and transnational collaborations. I will then examine the work of the two sexologists most commonly considered to represent British and German sexology – Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld – showing how their lives and writings connect them with a wide, interdisciplinary network of non-medical specialists and writers. My discussion will thereby contest two elements of the debate around the scientification of sex at the fin de siècle: whether ‘homosexuality’ and its many synonyms can be regarded as exclusively medical terms that can be viewed as independent from concurrent trends in historical, literary or socio-critical debates; or whether these terms should rather be understood as interdisciplinary constructs arising from literary and historical (as well as scientific) debates, thereby leading to a different understanding of what it might mean to write scientifically at all at the fin de siècle.

Coming to ‘Terms’ with Homosexuality, Inversion and Uranism Although the fin de siècle was a time during which discourses about sexuality and sexual types multiplied, the diverse terminology of sexual identity and orientation in the 1890s in Germany and Britain – the ‘homosexual’, the ‘invert’, the ‘Uranian’ – was inherited from discussions that took place in the preceding decades.5 In 1869, the German physician Carl Westphal published an article in which he discusses what he calls ‘conträre Sexualempfindung’, which literally translates as contrary sexual feeling (Westphal 2006).6 Chiara Beccalossi shows that it is in the Italian translation of this ‘conträre Sexualempfindung’ as ‘inversione sessuale’ by the Italian forensic doctor Arrigo Tamassia in 1878 that same-sex desire is first described as a form of inversion (Beccalossi 2012: 5–6). Jean-Martin Charcot’s and Valentin Magnan’s French translation as ‘inversion sexuelle’ in 1882, and the use of ‘sexual inversion’ in various English-language journals from the 1880s, subsequently consolidated the term. Westphal’s German term, through its translation into Italian, French and English, is then translated back into the German-speaking areas as ‘Inversion’, so that when Sigmund Freud publishes his famous Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he generally uses the term Inversion and only occasionally refers to Homosexualität, using both interchangeably (Freud 1953, 1940).7 Yet although ‘inversion’ appears to have translated uniformly from Italian into English, French and German, this uniformity hides the conceptual differences in the respective cultural and national uses. Beccalossi shows how the long history and the explanatory model for the term ‘sexual inversion’ differ greatly according to discipline, so much so that once psychiatry introduced the category of sexual inversion, competing disciplines redefined the subject to the point that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a psychiatrist and a gynaecologist might have been looking at two different things even though they both used the term sexual inversion. (Beccalossi 2012: 12) Rather than tracing the competing definitions of sexual inversion in their various cultural and national contexts, as Beccalossi has already done for the case of Italian sexology, here it will suffice to emphasise that inversion served as a focal point of interdisciplinary attention within the medico-scientific realm, but also, as we will see, beyond it.

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Westphal was a psychiatrist, and so it is commonly assumed that inversion, or homosexuality, is, in its origin, a psychiatric and by extension medical invention. But the man who coined the term ‘homosexuality’ was not a scientist at all. The birthplace of Karl-Maria Kertbeny (born Benkert to Hungarian parents), also known as Károly Mária Kertbeny, was Vienna, where he later worked as a translator and writer. He had made it his mission to popularise Hungarian writers, particularly in the Germanspeaking world (see Takács 2004). Kertbeny spent his years during the mid-nineteenth century doing a great many things. He spent some time at the British Museum, examining Hungarian books and manuscripts, worked as a journalist in Berlin, studied botany by himself whilst in hiding from the police at the Botanic Gardens in Leipzig, dabbled in the medical sciences without much formal university education, and researched music in Hungary. Kertbeny was the author of two anonymously published pamphlets, with the lengthy titles ‘§143 of the Prussian penal code of 14 April 1851 and its retention as §152 in the draft of a penal code for the North German Confederation’ and ‘The general harmfulness of §143 of the Prussian penal code of 14 April 1851 in its necessary cancellation as §152 in the draft of a penal code for the North German Confederation’.8 The first pamphlet, distributed in 1869, first openly made use of the term ‘Homosexualität’ (‘homosexuality’), but Kertbeny had already used it in a private letter the previous year (Takács 2004: 29). In the pamphlets Kertbeny called for the legal emancipation of men who have sex with men and the revision of the harmful §143 of the Prussian penal code, which criminalised so-called unnatural fornication, sexual intercourse between men and with animals, as §152 of the penal code of the North German Confederation. Kertbeny published his pamphlets anonymously, for fear, we can assume, of being criminalised by the same paragraphs of the penal code he criticised in his writing. He himself, however, did not really popularise the term ‘homosexuality’; and it was only in the 1980s that the historian Manfred Herzer uncovered the true identity of Kertbeny as the author of the pamphlets (see Herzer 1986; Féray and Herzer 1990). The terms ‘homosexuality’ (and ‘heterosexuality’, which Kertbeny also coined) were in practice given general currency by Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s monumental Psychopathia Sexualis (first published in 1886; extended versions were republished numerous times until 1903), which took the terms not directly from Kertbeny’s pamphlets, but from the naturalist Gustav Jäger’s Discovery of the Soul (1878). Jäger, in turn, had received a chapter contribution on homosexuality from Kertbeny, which he rejected because he considered it too controversial. It was thus that ‘homosexuality’, a term coined by a transnational literary figure and journalist, was incorporated as a medical term. It is important to note briefly that Kertbeny was not invested in a debate about whether homosexuality was innate, acquired or pathological. Instead, he argued that we should convince our opponents that exactly according to their legal notions they do not have anything to do with this inclination, let it be innate or voluntary, because the state does not have the right to intervene in what is happening between two consenting people.9 His argument here, more than any investment in scientific debates about homosexuality, relates much better to a libertarian position. The original circumstances under which the term ‘homosexualiy’ arose, then, were not a concern for medical explanatory

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models of homosexuality, but a critique of legal regulation and a political opposition to state intervention in the private lives of ‘homosexuals’. Kertbeny’s words regarding the intervention of the law into the private lives of ‘homosexuals’ appear in a draft letter from 1868 that was most probably sent to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Ulrichs was a Latinist, lawyer and independent scholar who had been trying to coin his own terminology, that of the Urning.10 Beginning in the 1860s and until his death in 1895, Ulrichs published on the topic of same-sex love between men. The studies that appeared in his twelve-volume Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (‘Studies on the Riddle of Male–Male Love’, 1864–79) were first published under the pseudonym Numa Numantius, but later Ulrichs outed himself by publishing under his real name. A scholar of ancient Greece and Rome by training, Ulrichs’s terminology of the Urning was inspired by Plato’s Symposium. Here, a distinction is made between two types of love that relate to the two accounts of the birth of the goddess Aphrodite. In one version, Uranus gives birth to her, without any input from a female partner. The version of the Uranian Aphrodite is thus associated with love between men, and especially a feeling of love towards younger men, and ‘Uranian’ was a term exclusively used for male subjects. The second account of Aphrodite’s birth shows her as born to Zeus and Dione. Ulrichs consequently calls men who are sexually attracted to men Urninge, translated as Uranian, and men who are sexually attracted to women Dioninge. He defined a Uranian as having ‘anima muliebris virile corpore inclusa’ – ‘a woman’s soul confined by a man’s body’ (see Kennedy 1997). This idea would become central to later understandings of inversion. The female equivalent of the Uranian was the Urninde, although the term never really caught on. Nonetheless, Ulrichs’s work made an impression on later generations of lesbian writers. In Radclyffe Hall’s famous novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), in which the protagonist Stephen Gordon embarks on a journey of discovery of her own sexual desires and gender identity, Ulrichs’s work comes up in a passage in which Stephen’s father, Sir Philip, ponders on his daughter’s queer behaviour: Alone in that grave-looking, quiet study, he would unlock a drawer in his ample desk, and would get out a slim volume recently acquired, and would read and re-read it in the silence. The author was a German, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and reading, Sir Philip’s eyes would grow puzzled; then groping for a pencil he would make little notes all along the immaculate margins. Sometimes he would jump up and pace the room quickly, pausing now and again to stare at a picture – the portrait of Stephen painted with her mother, by Millais, the previous year. He would notice the gracious beauty of Anna, so perfect a thing, so completely reassuring; and then that indefinable quality in Stephen that made her look wrong in the clothes she was wearing. (Hall 2005: 19)11 Whereas Kertbeny was not interested in arguments about the innateness of homosexuality, Ulrichs’s concept of the Uranian, as mediated by Hall’s literary text, makes it clear that Uranism is firmly linked to the physicality of the queer body. Stephen’s Uranism can be visually detected; her body refuses to fit into female attire. By calling her female protagonist Stephen, Hall reminds her reader at every mention of the name that being an Urninde marks not only sexual desire but also gender identity.12

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By the end of the nineteenth century, the terms describing same-sex desire – Uranism, homosexuality and inversion – had become near-synonyms. But their origin is far from uniform, and far from exclusively medical. Definitions of homosexuality, inversion or Uranism can range from an insistence on pathology (Westphal) to the argument that same-sex desire is absolutely innate (Ulrichs), and even to the insistence on the total irrelevance of the nature question (Kertbeny). The terminology describing same-sex desire was influenced by Greek and Latin history, an interest in Hungarian literature, human rights discourses, sexual rights politics and medicine. It is with this terminological baggage of ‘sexual inversion’, ‘contrary sexual desire’, ‘homosexuality’ and ‘Uranism’ that we arrive at the fin de siècle, when Havelock Ellis’s and Magnus Hirschfeld’s work as sexologists begins.

Havelock Ellis and British Sexual Sciences Havelock Ellis is commonly considered the pioneer of British sexology. His Sexual Inversion is said to be one of the earliest sexological publications from Britain which dealt at length with the topic of sexual inversion or homosexuality – a term which Ellis used begrudgingly only by necessity: ‘“Homosexual” is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it. It is, however, convenient, and is now widely used’ (Ellis 2008: 96). Yet this foundational work of British sexology, which set up Ellis’s career as Britain’s best-known sexologist, did not have its debut in Britain (it was originally published in Germany), was not sexological per se (the German term Sexualwissenschaft was not coined until 1906), and was, in large part, the brainchild of another man: the British poet, classicist, Renaissance scholar and literary critic John Addington Symonds. In this section, I want to trace this interdisciplinary, collaborative, international and intercultural history of Sexual Inversion.13 Ellis only possessed a licence from the Society of Apothecaries, the lowest possible medical qualification that would allow him to practise medicine. Like Magnus Hirschfeld, Ellis’s early (and in his case only) period of medical practice was a post at a hydropathic clinic (see Brady 2012: 28). Rather than an interest in any particular aspect of medical practice, Ellis’s socio-political environment and his wider network of feminists, activists and sexual reformers led to his interest in the topic of sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular (2012: 28). He was married to the women’s rights activist and openly lesbian Edith Lees Ellis, whose 1914 lecture tour in the US contributed to the dissemination of sexual sciences. Havelock Ellis also befriended the poet, philosopher and gay rights activist Edward Carpenter, whose work drew on scientific terminology (for example, in The Intermediate Sex (1908)). Amongst Ellis’s other noteworthy acquaintances were the feminist and birth-control campaigner Stella Browne, who would go on to play a significant role in the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, founded in 1913; and the writer and anti-war campaigner Olive Schreiner, whose novels reveal a preoccupation with the construction of gender norms and female emancipation.14 Just as we will see in the German example, a change in legal attitudes towards homosexual acts also seems to have influenced Ellis’s socio-political interest in inversion at this particular point in time. If the legal attitude towards homosexuality was severe, yet only vaguely defined, throughout the nineteenth century, the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalised ‘indecent acts’, whether they took place in public

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or in private. Ellis’s understanding of homosexuality, or sexual inversion, was rather sympathetic to the plight of ‘inverts’. He argues that ‘we must regard sexual inversion as largely a congenital phenomenon, or, to speak more accurately, as a phenomenon which is based on congenital conditions’, and that the rational way of regarding the normal sexual impulse is as an inborn organic impulse, developing about the time of puberty. At this point suggestion and association may come to play a part in defining the object of the emotion; the soil is now ready, but the variety of seeds likely to thrive in it is limited. (Ellis 2008: 200–1) Emphasising that all forms of sexual attraction have a congenital origin in combination with acquired characteristics, his views were also rather similar to those of the German psychiatrist and (together with Magnus Hirschfeld and Iwan Bloch) founder of German Sexualwissenschaft Albert Moll, who turned away from degeneration theory whilst maintaining a hereditary link (see Ellis 2008: 42).15 The way in which both Ellis and his collaborator Symonds understood inversion was that social, religious, class and other circumstances shape the way in which any given culture can possibly understand it, and so (in Symonds’s words): ‘[w]e do not catch it thus at present in its natural & unimpeded evolution’ (letter to Ellis, 11 February 1893, cited in Ellis 2008: 52). In short: if in some cultures ‘inverts’ are shunned, it is society that has to change, not the ‘inverts’ themselves. Ellis then turned towards medical writing because he believed that ‘a language of facts’ would best be able to achieve his aim of showing that inversion was neither criminal nor avoidable (Ellis 2008: 12). If we turn to Symonds, however, Sexual Inversion began with a very different kind of language of facts. In 1889, Symonds wrote his memoirs, and upon realising that the work he had written was ‘a very singular book – perhaps unique, in the disclosure of a type of man who has not yet been classified’, he began to read the works of continental sexologists to understand his situation better (letter to Brown, 29 December 1891, cited in Brady 2012: 20). Of course his book was neither singular nor unique: the memoirs of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who had coined the term ‘Uranian’, had been published over twenty years earlier, and in Germany there existed, by now, a wealth of homosexual memoirs and life writings.16 Indeed, in Germany life writing and selfaccounts of ‘inverts’ and their kin had boomed. Only four years after writing his own autobiographical account, when he had had time to peruse the sexological literature of the Continent and was collecting case studies with Ellis for Sexual Inversion, Symonds had to point out that he had to avoid those accounts that adhered to the fixed ‘style’ of confession that he had seen in Ulrichs’s and Krafft-Ebing’s works (cited in Crozier 2000: 131). Symonds recognised that such sexological life writings had become almost a genre in themselves: not just the secret confessions of ‘inverts’, but the public narratives that found their way into Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis or were published on their own. Unlike Ellis, Symonds had received no medical education, although he may have been familiar with medical literature through the work of his father, a physician who lectured on forensic medicine. As a Hellenist scholar, Symonds approached sexual inversion from a sociological, literary and historical standpoint, and he was often highly critical of an overly medical approach to the topic. He was dissatisfied with the pathologisation of inversion as well as with the alternative and more esoteric

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explanations. In his memoirs, he writes: ‘It appears to me that the abnormality in question is not to be explained either by Ulrich’s [sic] theory, or by the presumptions of the pathological psychologists’ (cited in Brady 2012: 21). It is after this that he wrote A Problem in Modern Ethics (privately printed in 1891), in which, as Brady argues, Symonds offers ‘the first humanist criticism of the tendencies in the nineteenth century for new scientific interpretations of homosexuality to pathologise same-sex sexuality’ (Brady 2012: 1). The first contact between Symonds and Ellis, who never met in person but conducted their entire correspondence, personal and professional, via letters, was on the topic of literature and poetry. Symonds had written an introduction to Elizabethan drama for Ellis’s Mermaid Series, which published reprints of popular texts from the English dramatic tradition. In 1890 Symonds contacted Ellis to get his thoughts on Walt Whitman’s poems ‘Calamus’ in Leaves of Grass (first published in 1855) (Ellis 2008: 34). Symonds was determined to initiate a scientific publication on homosexuality, whether with Ellis or without, and they agreed to proceed in a collaborative writing project. Symonds’s interest in literature and history, and in particular ancient Greece, was to become a major influence on the early collaboration on Sexual Inversion. He stressed that ‘the historical study of Greece is absolutely essential to the psychological treatment of the subject now’ (cited in Ellis 2008: 36). Another reason why Symonds insisted on including his chapter on Greek love in Sexual Inversion was that, as Brady points out, ‘[t]he late Victorians held an almost fetishistic obsession in the 1860s and 1870s with Greek culture’, although they stayed well clear of discussing sexuality in this context (Brady 2012: 13–14).17 Yet Symonds’s insistence on focusing on ancient Greece was also a point of slight disagreement between him and Ellis. If Ellis was reluctant to use the example of homosexuality in ancient Greece, this was because there it was presented as a wilful act, and any comparison would not support his argument that homosexuality was, at least to some extent, congenital or hereditary (Ellis 2008: 43). Ellis reduced the number of references to ancient Greece in subsequent republications of the book, in favour of including case studies. He probaby did so in an attempt to make Sexual Inversion more scientific.18 Yet ironically, as has already been discussed above, these case studies had become a highly fashioned genre with a fixed style, and rather than silent contributors to scientific studies, they offered a critical and often crafted take on sexology itself.19 To show one example from Symonds’s own life: in an (undated and untitled) essay sent to Krafft-Ebing, he presented a polemic on the problem of specialists in discussions of homosexuality. As a consequence, Krafft-Ebing promptly published the essay as a case in the 1889 edition of Psychopathia Sexualis (Brady 2012: 3). Symonds himself thus became a case, though not an uncritical or unbiased one. Brady claims that ‘[i]t is indicative of the increasing importance of scientific analysis and its authority in this period that the literary and historical material by Symonds were to be included in parentheses to the main scientific study in Sexual Inversion’ (2012: 31). I would argue that we should turn this statement on its head: the fact that Symonds’s literary and historical material appeared in a work that was aimed at psychiatrists and physicians at all shows how close the link between historical, literary, medical and social inquiries was in the context of sexological research. Symonds died in 1893 and Ellis subsequently had to carry out the majority of the work on Sexual Inversion by himself. The first full version of what was to become Sexual

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Inversion was initially published in a German translation under the title Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl, clearly referencing Westphal’s ‘Die conträre Sexualempfindung’ of 1869, discussed above. Initially, Ellis was unable to find a publishing house willing to publish his work in Britain. Wilhelmine Germany, as the centre of sexological activity with significantly less restrictive censorship laws, provided a suitable alternative. When it finally appeared in Britain in 1897, the publication of Sexual Inversion was ill-fated. In the first year of its existence, as Beccalossi says, ‘Sexual Inversion created scarcely a ripple amongst British medical readers’ (Beccalossi 2012: 185). However, after the first Englishlanguage edition was published, Horatio Brown, Symonds’s executor, withdrew permission for Symonds to be named as author and subsequently purchased and pulped most remaining copies of the book. Ellis then chose to publish the second English-language edition with Watford University Press, which was more obscure and less reputable than its name suggested. Merely six months after the second edition appeared, now under Ellis’s name alone, Watford University Press turned out to be involved in various scandals, which resulted not only in the immediate banning of the text as pornographic, but in a full-blown public scandal, known as the Bedborough trial. George Bedborough was the secretary of the Legitimation League, an organisation advocating ‘New Sexuality’. The League’s magazine The Adult was published by Watford University Press. When an undercover police agent found that Bedborough was selling copies of Sexual Inversion and other publications in his front room, he was arrested. Before London’s Central Criminal Court, he was accused of selling copies of ‘a wicked, lewd, impure, scandalous, and obscene libel’ (that is, Sexual Inversion).20 In the first years after publication, then, not only did Sexual Inversion fail to have an impact upon the scientific community to the extent its authors had hoped it would, but its status as a medico-scientific text did not protect it from being censored as obscene literature. Despite these initial difficulties, Ellis put Sexual Inversion through various editions for the British and American market (where all volumes of Ellis’s major series Studies in the Psychology of Sex were subsequently published, due to censorship laws in Britain) until 1915. Despite Symonds’s early death and the fact that Ellis had to do the larger part of the work on the volume by himself, the interdisciplinary nature of their collaboration and the combination of historicism, literature and classical reception, mixed in with scientific inquiries, is still very present in the final text. The table of contents for the introduction to Sexual Inversion exemplifies this: Prevalence of Homosexuality – Among Animals – Among the Lower Human Races – The Albanians – The Greeks – The Eskimo – The Tribes of the North-West United States – Homosexuality among Soldiers in Europe – Indifference frequently Manifested by European Lower Classes – Sexual Inversion at Rome – Homosexuality in Prisons – Among Men of Exceptional Intellect and Moral Leaders – Murat – Michelangelo – Winckelmann – Homosexuality in English History – Walt Whitman – Verlaine – Burton’s Climactic Theory of Homosexuality – The Racial Factor. (Ellis 2008: 96) Showing a concern for racial and class issues, literature, evolutionary similarities between humans and animals, the Greeks, scientific theories, moral integrity, the penal system, and cultural and historical similarities, Sexual Inversion is an exemplary text not only of the British fin de siècle, but of British sexology as an interdisciplinary field.

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In its introduction, Sexual Inversion also positions itself within Victorian understandings of sexuality, paying attention to morality and society, and emerging at a time in which anxieties abounded regarding race and degeneration, a crisis in masculinity, the ‘new woman’, the role of women within the family, prostitution, religion and class (see Ellis 2008: 2–4). What we can clearly see here is that the discussion of homosexuality in this sexological work is couched within the terms of literature, culture, history and society.

Magnus Hirschfeld and German Sexualwissenschaft Magnus Hirschfeld was one of the most influential sexologists at the intersection between science and sexual rights. As a sexual rights activist, filmmaker, writer, publisher and practitioner, Hirschfeld was a prominent public figure in early twentiethcentury Germany and beyond, notoriously dubbed the ‘Einstein of Sex’ by the US media during his lecture visit in 1930 (see Viereck 1930). Hirschfeld followed in the footsteps of many well-known sexologists from the German-speaking world before him: Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, a cornerstone, as I have noted, of the study of sexual science, was widely known when Hirschfeld began his career.21 Hirschfeld’s contemporary Albert Moll (mentioned above), the prolific sexologist, psychologist, physician and ethicist, also resident in Berlin, was another important voice in the sexological debate at the turn of the century – although Moll vehemently rejected Hirschfeld’s theories and his involvement in sexual rights activism.22 Another voice was the sexologist Iwan Bloch, who, as has already been mentioned, coined the term Sexualwissenschaft. In his sexological theories, Hirschfeld attempted to argue for the naturalness of sexual variation. In his very first sexological publication, a brief pamphlet, ‘Sappho und Sokrates: Wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts?’ (‘Sappho and Socrates: How can one explain the love of men and women for people of their own sex?’), published in 1896, Hirschfeld makes an initial attempt to explain the biological causes of homosexuality. He also begins his sexological study with an aphorism by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: ‘Das eigentliche Studium der Menschheit ist der Mensch’ (‘The proper study of humanity is the human being’) (Hirschfeld 1896). This combination of scientific thought introduced and framed by cultural and canonical knowledge and a humanist commitment to social ideals is, as will be seen, paradigmatic of Hirschfeld’s sexological work. In ‘Sappho and Socrates’ Hirschfeld presents six different types of psychosexual orientations and paves the way to a long career during which these types and their theorisation in his own work will change, develop and be rebuilt, but with the connection between sexual desire and biological causes remaining a constant. Like Kertbeny and Ulrichs, Hirschfeld at first published under a pseudonym – T. Ramien – and his theory of ‘sexual intermediate types’ elaborates on Ulrichs’s notion of Uranism. His six types presented here are ‘normal men who love women’, ‘normal women who love men’, ‘male soul-hermaphrodites’, ‘female soul-hermaphrodites’, ‘men who love men – Urninge’ and ‘women who love women – Urniginnen’. What differentiates these various types, according to Hirschfeld, is different combinations between the development of biological sex and the sexual drive.

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The theory sketched out in this pamphlet is rudimentary at most and rife with errors. Hirschfeld claims, for example, that Sappho committed suicide because of unrequited love for a woman, when in fact it was a man she had loved. The pamphlet also reveals the contradictions within Hirschfeld’s theoretical framework: he was opposed to understanding homosexuality as a form of degeneration, but he also resorted to common hereditary arguments about homosexuality, such as alcoholism and sexually transmitted illnesses. Nonetheless, this first publication aptly foreshadows a lifelong dedication to the theorisation of human sexual desire and gender identity. The thought he outlines in this pamphlet becomes, as Hirschfeld’s biographer Elena Mancini has put it, a kind of ‘thematic matrix’ of his later work (Mancini 2010: 53). Hirschfeld’s terminology for homosexuality would remain more varied than that of most other sexologists. His publications include Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (‘The homosexuality of men and women’), Der Urnische Mensch (‘The Uranian’) and his famous ‘Berlins Drittes Geschlecht’ (‘Berlin’s third sex’), which was both a sociological study of, and specialist travel guide to, queer Berlin (Hirschfield 1914; 1903a; 1904). He refers to ‘Uranians’, ‘inverts’ and ‘homosexuals’ alike, and often also uses the terms ‘third sex’ and ‘sexual intermediate types’. The last remains one of the most baffling and imprecise terms that Hirschfeld nonetheless sustained through his journal, the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (‘Yearbook for Sexual Intermediate Types’) from 1899 to 1923. Hirschfeld’s lifelong commitment to the legal rights and protection of homosexual men was formalised by the founding of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (WhK, ‘Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’) in 1897, together with his publisher Max Spohr, the author Franz Joseph von Bülow and the railway official Edward Oberg. In 1904, the WhK presented a petition to the Reichstag Commission to plead for the decriminalisation of homosexual men. It was rejected, but humanely so, and not entirely without support. Then the Eulenburg affair broke out. In 1906, the journalist Maximilian Harden accused Prince Philipp Eulenburg, a close confidant of Emperor Wilhelm II, of homosexuality.23 The scandal continued to dominate the German-speaking press for many years, and when the WhK submitted a second petition in the midst of these public affairs, it was rejected immediately. Female homosexuality was not included in §175, but throughout Hirschfeld’s campaign with the WhK there was a threat that this might occur. This led the WhK to form a close alliance with the German Women’s Movement (see Wolff 1986: 86). Hirschfeld was particularly impressed by the work of the feminist and sexual reformer Helene Stöcker. In 1908 she became the first woman to write for his Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, the journal of sexual science. Stöcker had a doctorate in aesthetics and literature and argued that literature, especially the writing of the Romantics, had paved the way for a discussion of the spiritual and physical aspects of love of her day, arguing that, ‘[n]ot until the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century did modern art and philosophy bring about the refinement of sexual life. Above all Goethe, the Romantics and Nietzsche should be mentioned here’ (cited in Mancini 2010: 6). Stöcker went on to form the Internationale Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform (‘International Alliance for the Protection of Mothers and for Sexual Reform’) in 1911. Besides

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Stöcker, Hirschfeld had a close connection with many other feminists and lesbian rights activists, such as his sister, the feminist Franziska Mann; the feminist writer and member of the WhK Johanna Elberskirchen; and the lesbian activist Theodora Anna Sprüngli, better known under her pseudonym Anna Rüling.24 Just like Ellis, Hirschfeld began his medical practice with a stint as a practitioner of hydrotherapy and nature cures (see Wolff 1986: 32). Like Ellis, Hirschfeld was personally acquainted with many of the ‘inverts’ in his local Berlin, so much so that his sexological inquiries into their everyday life turned him into somewhat of a queer sociologist. As Charlotte Wolff describes it in her biography of Hirschfeld: During the first years of the twentieth century, Hirschfeld certainly had a field day visiting pubs, hotels and the private houses of homosexuals to see, to learn and to live in an atmosphere which was close to his heart. . . . Since the publication of ‘Sappho and Socrates’, many homosexuals had come to his surgery for psychological and legal advice. He helped them as much as they helped his research. His investigation of their collective life was both a social study and a personal pleasure. (1986: 52) That his sociological fieldwork informed his sexological work and indeed influenced his colleagues is made clear in one example. During one of his field trips, he took along the German psychiatrist and criminologist Paul Näcke, who was at that point still undecided about whether homosexuality was pathological or a natural occurrence. But after his trip to the underbelly of Berlin’s queer nightlife, to which Hirschfeld had introduced him, Näcke began to agree with Hirschfeld on the natural variation of sexual types (Näcke 1904). Like Ulrichs and Symonds, Hirschfeld was also deeply concerned with giving homosexuality a past. As such, he became something of a prototype of today’s LGBT historian. His historical efforts were often spurred on and idealised by his Romantic streak. In 1908 he went on a trip to Italy, a country that had offered refuge to other homosexual figures, such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Johann Winckelmann – both of whom are also mentioned in Ellis’s and Symonds’s Sexual Inversion. In Italy, Hirschfeld ‘visited Winckelmann’s grave, laid flowers on it, and read from Goethe’s Italienische Reise those passages where he expressed his great admiration for Winckelmann’ (Wolff 1986: 80). These attempts at historicising homosexuality served to assure his ‘inverts’ of his time that they were part of a long lineage of homosexual men and women. In the film Anders als die Andern (‘Different from the Others’), which Hirschfeld helped to make in 1919, this lineage is depicted as a literal parade of men in historical dress, whilst the intertitle announces ‘an endless procession . . . from all times’ (Oswald and Hirschfeld 1919). Like his colleague Helene Stöcker, Hirschfeld dedicated his early years as a sexual reformer to the study of literature and art. In an article reflecting back on his life and work for his sixtieth birthday, Hirschfeld himself writes: When I moved on from my study of modern language and literature to the study of natural sciences and medicine, I did so mostly due to external factors; inside I felt and still feel until this day a closer affinity with journalists and artists than I feel with doctors, professors and the Wirklichen Geheimen Obermedizinalräte [an honorary medical title that had been bestowed upon Hirschfeld only recently]. (cited in Prickett 2004: 359)25

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In the 1890s, Hirschfeld became a member of the Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis, a loose group of writers, poets and dramatists. Here, together with his sister Franziska, Hirschfeld met the playwright Frank Wedekind, the novelist and dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann and many other literary figures. Indeed, Hirschfeld’s preoccupation with literary writing, in particular, was also present in his sexological publications.26 Hirschfeld went so far as to describe literature as the ‘ältere Schwester der Sexualwissenschaft’, ‘the big sister of sexology’ (cited in Prickett 2004: 359). In Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Hirschfeld dedicated an entire chapter to literary representations of same-sex love, and in his Yearbook for Sexual Intermediate Types he published biographical vignettes of famous ‘homosexual’ poets and writers, such as Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde (Hansen 1901; Prätorius 1901).27 With Hirschfeld’s interest in literature and art in mind, it is unsurprising that he would also develop an interest in the new media of photography and film. Since the early twentieth century, Hirschfeld had been keen to experiment with various forms of representation, soon enlisting photography for his purposes. In 1907, one of the deputy directors of the WhK, Dr Merzbach, travelled to New York to speak about Hirschfeld’s sexological work to the Medical Society of Jurisprudence. Part of his presentation included a series of photographs and pictures of sexual variants from Hirschfeld’s collection, which he exhibited for his audience (see Wolff 1986: 100). For the 1913 International Congress of Physicians in London, Hirschfeld brought along 150 photographic slides, which were shown at the cinema of Imperial College (1986: 136). Such photographs of medical examination, which Hirschfeld included in his publications and as exhibits to present during talks like these, are meant to be viewed with a coolly medical gaze. Yet his published photographs always include the careful staging of the subject, sometimes partially obscured, sometimes fully clothed, at other times naked but with the hands of the sexologist reaching into the frame to display body parts. Their staging always includes some form of photographic performance, which creates the sense of discovery that the viewer then perceives as a natural expression of the body when viewing such photographs (see Sykora 2004).28 Hirschfeld may have intended to use them to document his ‘sexual intermediate types’ in their natural state, but the outcome was most often a crafted and performative visual narrative. After the First World War, Hirschfeld would go on to use the new medium of film for similar purposes. Although most of the films which he supported are now lost or were destroyed, Anders als die Andern (1919) has survived as the first gay rights film, in which Hirschfeld uses the creative medium of film to historicise homosexuality, to warn of the dangers of suicide triggered by blackmail, and to suggest that relatives show support for ‘inverts’ in their family.29 Hirschfeld was a prolific writer of scientific papers and monographs and, after the First World War, his interest in the biological sciences continued to increase. As an admirer of the work of Eugen Steinach, who had been conducting experiments on animal testes to determine the influence of their secretions on sexual potency and fatigue, Hirschfeld became particularly interested in endocrinology. Yet it is his public-facing work in particular – his films, photography and public lectures – that would guarantee him a place at the heart of social and literary activity in Berlin. His Institute of Sexology, which was located in Berlin from 1919 until its destruction in

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1933, became a central meeting place for biologists, medical practitioners and sex educators, but it also became a place of interest for international writers, such as André Gide, Til Brugman and Christopher Isherwood, and the community of ‘homosexuals’, ‘inverts’ and ‘Uranians’ alike. Throughout his life’s work, from his pamphlet on the legal emancipation of men who have sex with men which opens with Goethe, to the founding of his Institute of Sexology as sexological, literary and cultural hub alike, Hirschfeld revealed sexology to be an interdisciplinary Wissenschaft, in the broadest sense.

Conclusion Fin-de-siècle sexual sciences originated in, and developed alongside, social, cultural and literary debates as much as biological, medical and clinical research. By focusing on this intersection, this chapter not only reveals sexual sciences as a paradigmatic component of the fin de siècle, but also emphasises that sciences can – and should – never be considered as separate from the culture and society within which they are developed.30 I have shown how sexology in Germany and Britain was shaped by transnational figures (Kertbeny), interdisciplinary collaborations (Symonds and Ellis) and international dialogue (Kertbeny and Ulrichs, Ulrichs and Symonds). Homosexuality, inversion and Uranism have been shown to be the product of various genres and media, from historical and literary writing, to scientific treatise, to photographic representation and film performances. As such, medico-scientific thinking about homosexuality and inversion transgressed boundaries, not just those of binary genders and normative understandings of sexuality, but also national, medical and disciplinary ones. By investigating the sexual sciences through the lives and works of Hirschfeld and Ellis, this chapter has also revealed links to a much broader and diverse set of issues with which literary and scientific writings at the fin de siècle were preoccupied, such as degeneration, decadence, heredity and changing views on criminality. To look at the emergence of the ‘Uranian’, ‘invert’ and ‘homosexual’, and the ways in which they were utilised as discussion points of sexual knowledge in the legal, scientific and political sense, shows how this key aspect of fin-de-siècle thinking mattered, not only at the end of the nineteenth century, but throughout the decades that followed, and indeed all the way to the turn of the following century. Fin-de-siècle conceptions of ‘homosexuality’ and ‘sexual inversion’ introduced an age of modern understandings of sexuality and of sexual rights politics. We might even go so far as saying that the work of early sexologists to understand sex, gender and sexuality in all its variations, and to form a theoretical understanding of such variations, laid the foundation for gender studies and queer theory as developed in the final decades of the twentieth century. Here, the ongoing legacy of the sexologists is revealed and once again shows that the sexual sciences had an influence beyond the medical and into the realm of society, literature and culture.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Andrew J. Webber, Jana Funke and Chiara Beccalossi for their careful reading and helpful advice on this chapter.

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Notes 1. Howard Chiang (2010) uses the term ‘scientification of sex’ to describe how sexologists at the turn of the twentieth century moved away from a ‘psychiatrization of sex’ towards a more comprehensive discussion of sexuality. 2. It is of course important to note that ‘the medical’ itself is not a stable term, but a broad field within which there can be debates between disciplines. 3. In this chapter I will use the terms ‘sexual sciences’ and ‘sexology’ as interchangeable translations of the German term Sexualwissenschaft. 4. Jana Funke (2016b) has shown how sexological thought and literary production at the fin de siècle and into the modernist period could not be neatly separated, but that definitions of sex, gender and sexuality continued to be collaboratively negotiated in the early twentieth century. Funke’s argument thereby also questions the common narrative that, while the sexual sciences may have allowed for a variety of ambiguous and open-ended understandings of sexuality at the fin de siècle, they afterwards congealed into a kind of ‘surgical modernism’ that limited possibilities for non-essentialist understandings of selfhood and sexuality. 5. Beyond the ‘homosexual’, ‘invert’ and ‘Uranian’, there was an even wider range of terms circulating in the medical and non-medical literature of the time, for example ‘Greek love’, ‘pederasty’, ‘third sex’, ‘androgyne’, ‘effeminacy’, ‘homosociality’ and many more. 6. The original article was Carl Westphal, ‘Die conträre Sexualempfindung: Symptom eines neuropathischen (psychopathischen) Zustandes’, Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 1869–70, 2: 73–108. 7. It is only shortly after 1905 that Freud begins to use the term ‘homosexuality’ predominantly. 8. ‘§143 des Preussischen Strafgesetzbuches vom 14. April 1851 und seine Aufrechterhaltung als §152 im Entwurfe eines Strafgesetzbuches für den Norddeutschen Bund’ and ‘Das Gemeinschädliche des §143 des preussischen Strafgesetzbuches vom 14. April 1851 und daher seine nothwendige Tilgung als §152 im Entwurfe eines Strafgesetzbuches für den Norddeutschen Bund’; see Takács (2004: 29). 9. Kertbeny, draft letter, 6 May 1868, to (most probably) Karl Heinrich Ulrichs; see Takács (2004: 31). 10. Ulrichs also makes use of a range of other terms, such as ‘Dioning’ to denote a man who identifies as masculine and is sexually attracted to women. For further information about Ulrichs and the reception of classical antiquity in turn-of-the-century explorations of homosexuality in Germany more broadly, see Matzner (2010). 11. For further information about Radclyffe Hall’s writing, see Funke (2016a). 12. Freud used this term only once, rather flippantly, to refer to the ‘Wortführer des Uranismus’, ‘the spokesmen of Uranism’ (Freud 1940: 37). Ulrichs’s theory did not sit well with Freud’s own understanding of homosexuality as an object choice acquired through early childhood development. 13. For this, I am able to rely on the excellent work of Ivan Crozier (Ellis 2008) and Sean Brady (2012). Crozier’s edited and republished Sexual Inversion and Brady’s republication of Symonds’s writings and his correspondence with Ellis – both with detailed introductions – are also an invaluable source for an exploration of the collaboration between Ellis and Symonds. For an excellent discussion of British sexology and Ellis’s work beyond the medical, see Fisher and Funke (2015). 14. For a detailed discussion of Olive Schreiner’s and Edith Lees Ellis’s work in relation to the project of sexology, see Bauer (2009). 15. Albert Moll disliked both Freud and Hirschfeld, as he considered them frauds. 16. For a discussion of nineteenth-century autobiographies by homosexual men, see Müller (1991). 17. On the topic of Victorian Hellenism, see Dowling (1994).

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18. Joseph Bristow (1998: 79–89) makes the argument that Ellis’s and Symonds’s roles in Sexual Inversion were clearly defined: Ellis represented inversion with a focus on heredity, Symonds with a focus on history. I argue that their roles were not so clearly distinguished. 19. For one such case in which a piece of sexological life writing is shown both to construct and to critique sexological thought, see my article on the writer N. O. Body (Linge 2015). 20. For a full discussion of the Bedborough trial, see Beccalossi (2012: 185–92). 21. For a detailed discussion of Krafft-Ebing’s contribution to the construction of a modern concept of sexuality, see Oosterhuis (2000). 22. For more information about Moll, see Maehle and Sauerteig (2012). 23. For a detailed account of the Harden–Eulenburg affair, see Domeier (2015). 24. For more information about Johanna Elberskirchen, see Leidinger (2008); about Anna Rüling, see Leng (2012). 25. ‘Als ich vom Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literatur zu dem der Naturwissenschaften und Medizin überging, geschah dies mehr aus äußeren Erwägungen; innerlich fühlte ich mich und fühle ich mich bis zum heutigen Tage den Journalisten und Künstlern wesensverwandter als den Doktoren, Professoren und Wirklichen Geheimen Obermedizinalräten.’ Translation from the German is my own. 26. For more information about Hirschfeld’s relationship with literature, see Kraß (2013). 27. ‘Numa Prätorius’ was a pseudonym used by the French sexologist and lawyer Eugène Wilhelm. 28. For more information about sexology, homosexuality and photography, see Prickett (2003). 29. Hirschfeld was also an honorary president of the magazine Film und Volk founded in 1928, which was only published for two years. 30. For a discussion of the shared language of turn-of-the-century literature and science in and beyond Europe more broadly, see Craig and Linge (2017).

Works Cited Bauer, H. (2009), English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Beccalossi, C. (2012), Female Sexual Inversion: Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, c. 1870–1920, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brady, S. (ed.) (2012), John Addington Symonds and Homosexuality: A Critical Edition of Sources, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bristow, J. (1998), ‘Symonds’s History, Ellis’s Heredity: Sexual Inversion’, in L. Bland and L. Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 79–99. Chiang, H. H. (2010), ‘Liberating Sex, Knowing Desire: Scientia Sexualis and Epistemic Turning Points in the History of Sexuality’, History of the Human Sciences, 23: 42–69. Craig, R. and I. Linge (eds) (2017), Biological Discourses: The Language of Literature and Science around 1900, Oxford: Peter Lang. Crozier, I. (2000), ‘Havelock Ellis, Eonism and the Patient’s Discourse; Or, Writing a Book about Sex’, History of Psychiatry, xi: 125–54. Domeier, N. (2015), The Eulenburg Affair: A Cultural History of Politics in the German Empire, Rochester: Camden House. Dowling, L. (1994), Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ellis, H (2008), Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition, ed. I. Crozier, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ellis, H. and J. A. Symonds (1896), Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl, trans. H. Kurella, Leipzig: G. H. Wigand’s Verlag.

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Féray, J.-C. and M. Herzer (1990), ‘Homosexual Studies and Politics in the 19th Century: Karl Maria Kertbeny’, Journal of Homosexuality, 19: 23–47. Fisher, K. and J. Funke (2015), ‘British Sexual Science beyond the Medical: Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-Historical, and Cross-Cultural Translations’, in H. Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 95–114. Foucault, M. (1998), The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, London: Penguin. Freud, S. (1953), Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 6, trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press Freud, S. ([1905] 1940), Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, Frankfurt: S. Fischer. Funke, J. (2016a), ‘The World’ and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Funke, J. (2016b), ‘Intersexions: Dandyism, Cross-Dressing, Transgender’, in L. Marcus, M. Mendelssohn and K. Shepherd-Barr (eds), Late Victorian into Modern, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 414–28. Grosskurth, P. (1964), John Addington Symonds: A Biography, London: Longmans, Green. Hall, R. ([1928] 2005), The Well of Loneliness, London: Wordsworth. Halperin, D. M. (1990), No One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love, New York: Routledge. Hansen, A. (1901), ‘H. C. Andersen: Beweis seiner Homosexualität’, Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 3: 203–30. Herzer, M. (1986), ‘Kertbeny and the Nameless Love’, Journal of Homosexuality, 12: 1–25. Hirschfeld, M. (1914), Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Berlin: L. Marcus. Hirschfeld, M. (1907), ‘Die Gurgel Berlins’, in H. Oswald (ed.), Großstadt-Dokumente, vol. 41, 3rd edn, Leipzig: H. Seemann. Hirschfeld, M. (1904), ‘Berlins Drittes Geschlecht’, in H. Oswald (ed.), Großstadt-Dokumente, vol. 3, Berlin: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger. Hirschfeld, M. (1903a), Der Urnische Mensch, Leipzig: Max Spohr. Hirschfeld, M. (1903b), ‘Der Einfluss des Alkohols auf das Geschlechtsleben’, pamphlet, Charlottenburg: Fritz Stolt. Hirschfeld, M. [‘T. Ramien’] (1896), ‘Sappho und Sokrates: Wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts?’, pamphlet, Leipzig: Max Spohr. Kennedy, H. (1997), ‘Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist of Homosexuality’, in V. Rosario (ed.), Science and Homosexualities, New York: Routledge, pp. 26–45. Kraß, A. (2013), ‘Meine erste Geliebte’: Magnus Hirschfeld und sein Verhältnis zur schönen Literatur, Göttingen: Wallstein. Leidinger, C. (2008), Keine Tochter aus gutem Hause: Johanna Elberskirchen (1864–1943), Konstanz: UVK. Leng, K. (2012), ‘Anna Rüling, Michel Foucault, and the “Tactical Polyvalence” of the Female Homosexual’, in S. Spector, H. Puff and D. Herzog (eds), After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault, Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 95–108. Linge, I. (2015), ‘Gender and Agency between “Sexualwissenschaft” and Autobiography: The Case of N. O. Body’s Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren’, German Life and Letters, 68: 387–405. Maehle, A.-H. and L. Sauerteig (eds) (2012), ‘Special Issue: Sexology, Medical Ethics and Occultism: Albert Moll in Context’, Medical History, 56: 2. Mancini, E. (2010), Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marshall, G. (2007), ‘Introduction’, in G. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–12.

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Matzner, S. (2010), ‘From Uranians to Homosexuals: Philhellenism, Greek Homoeroticism and Gay Emancipation in Germany, 1835–1915’, Classical Receptions Journal, 2. 1: 60–91. Müller, K. (1991), Aber in meinem Herzen sprach eine Stimme so laut: Homosexuelle Autobiographien und medizinische Pathographien im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel. Näcke, P. (1904), ‘Ein Besuch bei den Homosexuellen in Berlin’, Archiv für Kriminal-anthropologie und Kriminalistik, 15: 244–63. Oosterhuis, H. (2000), Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Oswald, R. and M. Hirschfeld (1919), Anders als die Andern, film, Richard Oswald-Film Berlin. Prätorius, N. [E. Wilhelm] (1901), ‘Oscar Wilde’, Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 3: 265–72. Prickett, D. J. (2004), ‘“Mein Verhältnis zur schönen Literatur . . .”: Literarische Auseinandersetzungen mit Magnus Hirschfeld’, in E.-V. Kotowski and J. H. Schoeps (eds), Magnus Hirschfeld: Ein Leben im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft, Berlin: be. bra Verlag, pp. 357–70. Prickett, D. J. (2003), ‘Envisioning the Homosexual: Gender Performance, Photography, and the Modernist Homosexual Aesthetic’, in C. Duttlinger, L. Ruprecht and A. Webber (eds), Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 178–200. Schaffner, A. K. (2012), Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850–1930, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sykora, K. (2004), ‘Umkleidekabinen des Geschlechts: Sexualmedizinische Fotografie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert’, Fotogeschichte: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie, 24: 15–30. Takács, J. (2004), ‘The Double Life of Kertbeny’, in G. Hekma (ed.), Past and Present of Radical Sexual Politics, Amsterdam: Mosse Foundation, pp. 26–40. Tobin, R. D. (2015), Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Viereck, G. S. (1930), ‘Hirschfeld: The Einstein of Sex’, in G. S. Viereck, Glimpses of the Great, London: Duckworth, pp. 240–59. Westphal, C. (2006), ‘Contrary Sexual Feelings: Symptoms and a Neuropathic (Psychopathic) Condition’, in M. A. Lombardi-Nash (ed. and trans.), Sodomites and Urnings: Homosexual Representations in Classic German Journals, Binghamton: Harrington Park Press, pp. 87–120. Wolff, C. (1986), Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology, London: Quartet Books.

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21 The Anglo-African Adventure Novel in the 1890s Gerald Monsman

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round the end of the nineteenth century an old era seemed to close as a new wave of contemporary cultural thought and economic expansion began to unfold. But could modernity in culture and technology buoyantly raise the curtain on the twentieth century without also dropping it, for good or ill, on traditional institutions and values? Along with anxieties deriving from the proliferation of scientific discoveries and industrial-technological advances at home, the fin de siècle seemed equivocal about imperial power abroad. As reported in The London Times, monthly dinner meetings of journalists, politicians and novelists at the Anglo-African Writers’ Club in London discussed political realities and fashioned popular impressions in the English-speaking media of ‘others’ within the empire. In December of 1898 the honorary president of the Writers’ Club, James Bryce – in his day perhaps Britain’s most astute statesman and the recent author of Impressions of South Africa (1897) – defined the twin roles of the Club’s writers as dispelling British ignorance of colonial life and igniting colonial literary activity. With H. Rider Haggard himself ‘in the chair’, Bryce observed ‘that his first impressions of South Africa – formed before he went there – were derived from missionary narratives read in his youth’ (undoubtedly including Robert Moffat’s 1842 Missionary Labours and David Livingstone’s 1858 Missionary Travels) ‘and partly from the brilliant descriptions of their Chairman’. The London Times summarised his literary remarks that evening: As to the question of what the colonies might do for literary men, he thought they might give them new fields, new topics, new subjects which were very welcome now that the old fields had been tilled and crops reaped from them over and over again. . . . When the soil of the old country had been exhausted, there were abundant fields in the outlying portions of the Empire. The works of Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Pringle, Olive Schreiner, Mr. Scully, and Mr. Bryden, and the brilliant romances of the chairman, were instances of what the study of new conditions might do in the way of stimulating and developing the force of the writer’s thought, and he did not think it was idle to suppose that the time might come when the literary activity of the colonies themselves might be far more abundant than it was at present. (Quoted in Monsman 2010: 21) Bryce implied that Anglo-African fiction writers could gauge, and perhaps mediate, the changes of industrialisation coming to the crown colonies in Africa. His promise

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of ‘new fields, new topics, new subjects’ specifically included the developing subgenre of adventure fiction that benefitted from patriotic confidence in an expanding empire along with mass distribution and lower-cost newspapers and periodicals. Bryce’s Anglo-African cohort reached artistic maturity just as a monolithic industrial economy supplanted the old colonial agrarian life with its indigenous systems for the exchange of goods. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886, and the Zulu and Matabele wars in 1879 and 1893, brought about consortium mining, military expansion, international commerce, extension of railways and telegraph, labour migrancy and allied capitalist social pressures. The most prolific writers of ‘literary’ adventure fiction in that environment of the 1890s (accounting in the decade for more than twenty novels, exclusive of all other forms) were H. Rider Haggard, Bertram Mitford and Ernest Glanville, each intellectually mobilised by the significant dissent of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). Others in the 1890s whose fiction raised questions about social and economic forces in the colonies were W. C. Scully, H. A. Bryden, A. Conan Doyle John Buchan, Henry Merriman and Joseph Conrad.1 Their African scenes confront the immediacy of England’s entanglement with its colonies, recording first-hand impressions with artistic purpose and method no less penetratingly than highbrow works and, often, in a more timely fashion. The tale’s the thing, no doubt – but by no means the whole thing. Since these authors wrote (as Horace advised) both ‘to inform and to entertain’, their stories now have become invaluable historical documents of changing events, keeping routes alive through fiction into that awkward past without which we undeniably would know much less than we currently do. Mitford, Haggard and Glanville all had articulated a contemporaneous justification for such fiction as a record of ‘vanishing’ life (Mitford 1893: vi; Haggard 1894: 762–3; 1913: vi–vii) – vanishing, still in the continuous present, but which in the near future will be in tenses past. In his introduction to Kloof Yarns (1896) Glanville pinpoints this transition There are two South Africas – the South Africa of mining towns, of active commercial centres, . . . and the South Africa of a pastoral people, entirely outside the currents that flow between Europe and the mining camps. In this back country is contained what of romance and poetry there are in the land. Its animals and the forests are ‘forms of beauty, linking the present with the past’, of ‘incalculable benefit’ but at the mercy of ‘the advance of civilisation, which is deadly to nature and her wild children’. The following year, upon reprinting these earlier folk yarns together with twenty more in Tales from the Veld (1897), he says his stories are ‘true to the animal life and the scenery of a district in the Cape occupied by the British Settlers of 1820’, and he expresses a nostalgia for this rural world that once was ‘saturated with the superstitions and folk lore of the Kaffirs, and thoroughly familiar to the author – who passed his boyhood there’ (Glanville 1896: v–vi; 1897: vii).2 To lose sight of these frontier stories popular with previous generations is not only to lose this historical evidence, but also to miss in the widest sense of Aristotle’s mythos those elements in the narratives that embrace the complexities and consequences of being human. Aristotle himself had deemed the homespun taste for tales of the fireside, of deeds that made men miserable or happy – that is, the happenings of the plot

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– essential to the nature of imitative art and the source of its intellectual pleasure. These adventures testify to the humor and suffering inherent in the African frontier experience, to how people bewilderingly framed by a broader imperium that often ‘destroyed to replace’ experienced the contradictions and entanglements of human existence. Doubtless the modern roots of the British adventure novel may be traced back to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift’s fantasy, Gulliver’s Travels (1726); but adventure’s steady evolution and continuing durability into and beyond the 1890s certainly are owing not merely to a fatigue with the domestic Victorian novel in polite society. The adventure narrative is a form of ‘high romantic realism’, utilising the vitality of superstition and folklore but also coming to grips head-on with happenings and history, and with more energy than the ‘three-decker’ competing works. From Walter Scott’s historical fiction that combined realism and romance to Haggard’s success rivalling Stevenson in King Solomon’s Mines (1885), the balance of fact and fiction gave rise to ‘literary’ Anglo-African adventures that differ from fantasy owing to their empirical component. Apart from the fascination of Bible stories, classical legends and campfire tales of settler or indigene, the generic roots of adventure realism sprang from the personae of travel literature and from the ethnographer, naturalist, hunter, explorer, missionary, historian, biographer and letter writer. This unfolding subgenre with its historical or documentary foundation gave the mythological quest-hero a local habitation and a name. The adventure novel’s sibling was the ‘settler novel’ that utilised experiences of colonial-born men or women whose individuality was connected, like the indigenes, to their subsistence and physical survival skills on the land. Unlike in the settler novel, the adventure protagonist travels from England to Africa, encountering resistance by the forces of man or nature in search of a new vocation or of natural resources. Even when the protagonist seems an anti-hero, he persists as a gentleman ‘according to the exacting English standard’; and the heroine possesses a woman’s potential to heal the shatterings of his body and soul. In Robinson Crusoe the discovery of Friday’s footprint is an imagined incident popularly imposed on the tale, a supra-narrative image that seems to be there but isn’t. In much the same way a careless identification of the adventure writer with imperial failings underplays the complexity of the colonial system and replaces factual accuracy with polemical distortions. The nuances of the adventure aesthetic, its dialogue, imagery and action, signify that would-be interpreters who read ideologically will be unable to re-encode traces not explicitly written and will arrive at reductive interpretations. In making sense of the adventure genre the reader should not lose reality amidst sweeping pronouncements such as ‘the colonial mentality’, ‘victimization’, ‘Eurocentrism’, ‘gendered viewpoints’, ‘authorial control’, ‘cultural imperialism’, ‘oppressive power relationships’ or ‘racism’. Among colonial society as a whole, countless instances of careless racism and oppression occurred, powerfully depicted in Sergeant Inglefield in Mitford’s John Ames (1900). Specific instances of indigenous women oppressed are Marie in Merriman’s With Edged Tools (1894), the mistress of Schreiner’s protagonist in Trooper Peter Halket (1897) or Zeeta in Buchan’s Prester John (1910). But the worst excesses, described by Haggard, Mitford and Conrad, are among slavers. Speaking historically, many officials and settlers invested their best efforts for the indigenous peoples and their culture – at least within the British rule that replaced old tribal regimes. A surprising number of the 1890s adventure writers were imperial administrators able to

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interrogate their system from the inside: Haggard, Mitford, Scully and later Buchan; others were professionally active in the colonies (Doyle, Mitford, Glanville, Conrad); and yet others were first-hand observers. Contra Charlie Marlow’s ironies in Heart of Darkness (1899) about being ‘an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle’ (Conrad 1902: 67), many writers really did envision a new ameliorative empire with ‘the spirit of the dominions like a strong wind freshening the stuffiness of the old lands’ (Buchan 1940: 125; also Schreiner 1923: 354–5). Paralleling Schreiner’s opposition to social abuses, these writers understood that on some level attitudes are culturally situated, and that recognition of the subaltern’s perspective was essential for meaningful engagement. They consistently – not always explicitly, but more often by speaking fictionally ‘between the lines’ – disavowed the vampiric exploitation for which Cecil Rhodes’s ‘imperialism’ came to stand (Monsman 2010: 11–15). Thus in King Solomon’s Mines when Infadoos begs pardon of his visitors from ‘Venus’, the ‘imperial smile’ (Haggard 1885: 114) of Allan Quatermain (who was modelled on the hunter F. C. Selous) is given to the Kukuana as a kingly expression of goodwill; yet putting the text into its context also unpacks a smug (though life-saving) ‘imperial’ duplicity. Moreover, Haggard slyly allows Quatermain to observe of Umbopa-Ignosi’s victory chant: I once heard a scholar with a fine voice read aloud from a Greek poet called Homer, and . . . Ignosi’s chant, uttered as it was in a language as beautiful and sonorous as the old Greek, produced exactly the same effect on me. (237) Inasmuch as the ancient classics were considered the root of Western higher culture, what might Benjamin Jowett have said about that comparison? But because the colonised subjects of empire often hid their motivations and actions from the colonisers, adventure authors exerted themselves to transmit expressive and affective African realities, to validate their efforts by assessment and reassessment, questioning such ideological dogmas as might rule the moment and pegging their insights to multiple historical tethers. Additionally the writers shared control of their narratives: they used tribal stories, myths, legends, songs and oral histories; missionary treatises on indigenous religious beliefs; extended quotations of historical speakers; and ethnographic and archival data; and they employed indigenous narrative styles and proverbs. One knotty issue, however, occurs when an adventurous gentleman feels himself redundant at the empire’s metropolitan centre, but abroad he assumes the savage tribes are his to plunder. This is illustrated by Conan Doyle’s first story, his prototypical ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley’ (1879), in which the natives’ fear of a fiend’s ‘glowing eyes’ and ‘malignant power’ (Doyle 1896/7: 14–15) prove to be of a diamond in the moonlight. ‘Lucky’ Tom clears his mind of useless facts, in this instance the superstitions of the natives, and like Holmes, later, concludes by deduction and analysis that the demonic ‘eye’ (recycled in the Baskerville hound) is a refractive diamond. Doyle’s story ends with windfall wealth that preserves for Tom and his Watson-prototype narrator, Jack, the privileged status of gentlemen. It is left to longer, more reflective tales to deal with the moral ambiguities of society’s artificial definitions of economic value unknown to the natives’ animism. In balance with life itself, Haggard’s Quatermain pronounces the diamonds’ wealth ‘a valueless thing at the last’ (Haggard 1885: 287) and Bertram Mitford’s hero, Renshaw Fanning, calls such treasure ‘Mere dross’ (Mitford 1894b: 270). Renshaw’s encounter with the sacred Bushman diamond may contain empire

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fiction’s most subtle speaking between the lines. Because the Bushmen do not appreciate the economic value of their diamond ‘Eye’, Renshaw does not grasp the immorality of purloining it. At his sight of the stone, Mitford’s indirect discourse points out that the land’s ‘riches lying waste for ages in this remote solitude must at length yield to the grasping hand of their predestined owner – Man’ (243). Understandably, when an author such as Mitford actually participated as an administrator and journalist in the imperial enterprise, his readers supposed his words pandered to Anglo jingoism. But they carry an equivocation the author expected would remain unrecognised by every imperialist with a ‘grasping hand’ (compare Haggard’s identical image, 1887a: 94): the Bushman is indeed a ‘Man’ long pre-dating the Englishman. The readers’ disregard of humanity’s ancestral race shows they are imperceptive, that very impercipience being au fond Mitford’s ironic attack on racism. Walter Pater began a tradition of contrasting adventure romances with a scientifically supported psychological realism: That naive, rough sense of freedom, which supposes man’s will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, we can never have again. . . . For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves. Then echoing Darwin’s words from the last paragraph of Origin of Species – ‘tangled’, ‘law’ and (loosely) the ‘grandeur in this view of life’ – Pater bleakly concludes: ‘This entanglement, this network of law, becomes the tragic situation, in which certain groups of noble men and women work out for themselves a supreme Denouement’ (Pater 1873: 224–5). In Africa, Olive Schreiner in her preface to The Story of an African Farm (1883) also spurned this presumed single-plane-of-action romance as wild adventure; of cattle driven into inaccessible ‘kranzes’ by Bushmen; ‘of encounters with ravening lions, and hair-breadth escapes.’. . . Such works are best written in Piccadilly or in the Strand: there the gifts of the creative imagination, untrammeled by contact with any fact, may spread their wings. (Schreiner 1883: viii) Yet as Schreiner’s heroine lies dying, the ‘ravening lion’ she had banished to wild adventures is allowed to creep back into her narrative, transformed into the metonymic paw supporting a wardrobe at which the perishing girl stares, oppressed by its emblematic domesticity. As paw, this ravening lion embodies the web that hopelessly entangles her social and biological self. That preference for a psychological realism over external action is afterwards adapted to adventure in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) when the frame narrator observes: The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical . . . , and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (Conrad 1902: 55)

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Pragmatically, ‘nut’ and ‘haze’ work to suggest that Marlow’s meaning will not be wholly inside a shell of action or fact like some hard kernel but inclusive of the tale, its teller and the episode’s surrounding context like the haze of a lunar halo. This ‘halo’ reappears in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919; 1921): Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit? And because unlike nuts and gig lamps our mental ‘life escapes’ (Woolf 1925: 61), Woolf catches at its fleeting sensations and ideas, building up her misty halo, minim by minim. As heirs also to this revolt against a material episteme, the adventure writers of the 1890s inevitably recognised that if ‘eye, and ear’ present a factual world of nuts and gig lamps, such objective perceptions are likewise infused by ideation and imagination that ‘half create . . . the mighty world’ (Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’). E. B. Tylor’s anthropological definition of ‘life’ seems not far from this psychical halo: the ‘complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (Tylor 1871: 1). As do cultural studies of human societies, character-driven adventure stories emphasise unique interpersonal and intergroup relations, life’s antagonisms and connections, that are effectively focused through the passions of warfare, love and the profoundly ‘unknown and uncircumscribed’. In addition to embracing the realities of people living in society, that is, the down-to-earth realities of frontiers (such as physical skills, civil and religious practices, social mores, and variations among races and tribes) literary adventure fiction equally paid attention to motivations, to states or shades of consciousness, to purposes, differences of cultural values, and hidden but enfranchising possibilities in emotions such as terror, the uncanny, marvellous and supernatural – these together with basic sensory realities sum up human experience. In Mitford’s nightmarish The Weird of Deadly Hollow (1891) civilised rationality combines with folklore and the ghosts of legend to produce what the reader finds mysterious beneath the surfaces of quotidian life. Mitford binds the free-floating fears and contradictions of self and society to the ghosts of revenge and love in local history. When at Weird’s end the anti-hero has become as spectral as Van Niekirk’s leopard that haunts the land, Mitford expects his reader to embrace both rationality and the spirit world at once: the fantastic as possible, even as fundamental. Analogously in Schreiner’s Trooper Peter real life imitates the legendary story of divine sacrifice; but here reality produces not a ghost that relives its own depravity and loss but a prospective birth into a radical innocence of being. James Bryce’s call for new fields, topics or subjects implicitly juxtaposed the current globalising industrial economy with what Haggard called Africa’s essential ‘superstitious madness and bloodstained grandeur’. Haggard slightingly contrasted the empire’s current selfish grasping with the older, precarious life-ways: From those who continually must face the last great issues of life or death meanness and vulgarity are far removed. These qualities belong to the safe and crowded haunts of civilised men, not to the kraals of Bantu savages, where, at any rate of old, they might be sought in vain. (Haggard 1913: vi)

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The brilliant Scots author and administrator John Buchan later described his journey from the spiritual paralysis of London’s closed society to this African landscape as a discovery of ‘something infinite, ineffable and immortal’ (Buchan 1940: 121). In his A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906) Buchan created an imaginary politician, Sir Charles, who could not reconcile his political liberalism on London’s ignoble stage with the glory that must be the empire’s source of power, giving it the will to act. Charles kept two diaries: thirty volumes of his actual dry-as-dust political career and a shorter account of his fantasy self as a Byzantine emperor. Reflecting a public and private ‘double life,’ these two diaries overlapped with contrastingly parallel passages of reciprocal but radically different events. Because we ‘have in our breasts odds and ends of strange souls’ – this, a nod to E. B. Tylor’s anthropological notion of savage ‘survivals’, of which Haggard remarks that modern man may be reckoned up as ‘twenty parts, nineteen savage and one civilised’ (Haggard 1887: 6) – Sir Charles’s ‘clash of opposites’ between his real and imaginary selves is ‘an allegory and true of us all’. Self-realisation is ‘possible only as the result of the struggle of the soul with an alien world’; and tales of high romance exhibit ‘the perpetual contrast between the human spirit and its environment – nobility side by side with baseness in one soul, or the courage of man transcending impossible disasters, or beauty flowing in a mean place’ (Buchan 1906: 271–5). In Anglo-African adventure, the primal, demoniacal and inexplicable denote not Patrick Brantlinger’s ‘imperial gothic’, allegorising a repressed fear of demonic incursion or ‘of “civilization” turning into its opposite’ (Brantlinger 1985: 246–7), but an opportunity in Africa to rekindle vitality absent from Western culture. Civilisation’s entrapping secular materialism lacks soul, not least animism’s demons that are all aspects of Spirit (Scully 1915: 163–4). And whereas retreat from the alien or demonic brings disavowal and abjection, preternatural threat offers to the courageous the freedom of heroic self-affirmation. Since only imagination can voice the final truth about reality, fantasy and superstition become the portals to renewal across a threshold of adventure, offering a glimpse of that soul-world ‘which we would recreate for ourselves’ (Buchan 1906: 272). In Matthew Arnold’s image, such writers found the old world dead and the new ‘powerless to be born’. Only by employing the vanishing folklore of Africa and nature’s transforming freedom could imagination’s reach-as-awhole resuscitate stillborn capitalism and give birth to a living present. Accordingly, a writer like Haggard blurs the line between romance and history – Allan Quatermain calls his adventure ‘a true story’ (Haggard 1885: vi) and Horace Holly insists his is a ‘most wonderful history, as distinguished from romance’ (Haggard 1887b: 4) – suggesting the reader must supplement constructed and situated data with invention to understand the deep truths of reality.

Haggard’s Nada the Lily (1892) The most important adventure writer in the run-up to and during the 1890s was H. Rider Haggard, whose King Solomon’s Mines and She: A History of Adventure (1887) have become classics in the genre. Haggard’s early manhood in Africa was quite literally the stuff of fiction. As one of a small party that took over the gold-rich Dutch republic of the Transvaal, he personally hoisted the Union Jack over Pretoria’s capital and, as he recalled, ‘when the late Sir Melmoth Osborn grew nervous in reading the proclamation’ – they were standing in front of an armed, ominously silent crowd of Dutchmen – ‘I took it from his hand and finished the business’ (Haggard

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1980: 33–4, 111). Not surprisingly, Haggard excelled as a romancer both for his fastmoving, suspenseful, camp-fire story-telling style (which his early reviewers ironically often disparaged) and for the ‘disquieting vitality’ of his ‘mythopoeic’ vision (Lewis 1960: 1045) – echoes of fundamental things in the bedrock of human character such as courage, sacrifice, death, honour and the struggle with supernatural forces. Doyle’s diamond ‘eye’ may have been among Haggard’s first inspirations in King Solomon’s Mines for the adventure quest into an unknown world of solar myth and ancient magic. The legendary Solomon-Sheba and his fictional Twala-Gagool are icons of the African landscape in its phases of fertility and death. By their evil, Twala and Gagool displace Solomon and Sheba, who become ghosts that haunt the region. In the subplot, the love of Foulata and Good reflects this struggle of spiritual forces in nature against darkness. Foulata, ‘flower-crowned’, is chosen to be killed by Gagool, the darker aspect of the earth-mother’s cycle that precedes renewal. Dying, she asks Quatermain to tell Good that I love him, . . . I know that he cannot comber his life with such as me, for the sun cannot mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black. . . . Say that if I live again, mayhap I shall see him in the stars. (Haggard 1885: 281) These words, of which many narrow-minded Victorians would approve, actually reflect the star-crossed disruption of the natural by Twala and Gagool. Haggard intended Foulata (fortuitously) to echo Dante, whom Beatrice rendered ‘pure and apt for mounting to the stars’ (Dante 1914: 33.142). Foulata is forever separated from her revitalising consort because, owing to the adventurers’ return with the diamonds to mercantile England, Good cannot pursue her from this underworld to the stars. No more indefeasible expression of society’s deadening web could be invoked than Quatermain priggishly labelling her death ‘a fortunate occurrence’ (1885: 300). Haggard’s trio ends with diamonds in London, but at the cost of abandoning their spiritual birthright in nature. Though not as well known today as King Solomon’s Mines or She, Nada the Lily (1892) was published at the height of Haggard’s literary popularity. As an historical romance, it, together with his much later trilogy, Marie (1912), Child of Storm (1913) and Finished (1917), records the epic rise and fall of the Shakan dynasty. The tale of Nada is told to Quatermain by Mopo, a Zulu witch doctor and an assassin of Shaka, not long before the outbreak of the Zulu War in 1879. This war is invoked in the novel’s first sentence because it was a critical event that forever changed Zulu cultural formations, ending a nation that could contest British power. The setting and tellers of this ‘double-I’ narration thus create a dramatic contrast between the pre-colonial life of the indigenes and their new lives in the impending British era. Nathaniel Isaacs’s Travels (1836) and Henry Fynn’s accounts in his Diary propagated an early adventurer-trader image of Shaka as demonic and the Zulu kingdom as a genocidal society. Later historical studies, such as A. T. Bryant’s Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (1927) and recent works by John Wright, Julian Cobbing and Dan Wylie, have mitigated Shaka’s more lurid deeds. But Haggard’s strongest influence was his mentor, Sir Theophilus Shepstone, administrator of native policy in Natal and ‘holder of the spirit of Shaka’ (so called by the admiring Zulus), to whom Nada is dedicated. Shepstone defended the nobleness of Zulu life and supported indirect British rule through a strong indigenous leader.

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As a multi-voiced Zulu epic, Haggard’s history, even though seemingly constrained by the ideologically restricted parameters of empire fiction, replaced European stereotypes with depictions of Zulu cultural practices that go beyond cursory colonial presentations. However, the relationship of Mopo the story-teller to Quatermain the listener is unlike that in ethnographic accounts, since both doer and narrator are the author’s creation. Haggard remarked that anyone who would recount the bloody reign, assassinations and aftermath of this empire ‘must for a time forget his civilization, and think with the mind and speak with the voice of a Zulu of the old régime’ (Haggard 1892: x). Contemporary critics suggest that since Haggard did not rely exclusively on Zulu sources he could not reproduce pre-colonial life and history honestly. But all historical accounts reflect the personal ‘voice’ of their authors, and criticism of Nada might better consider Haggard’s artistic purpose and method. His intent was to express the old Zulu culture and character before they became entirely forgotten, not from the European point of view but as the Zulus had seen themselves. And as Nada’s dedication and preface impress upon the reader, Haggard’s method taps the extant fund of tradition, attitudes and evidence from oral and written accounts, from the fantastic figures of Galazi and Umslopogaas, to the quasi-fictional Mopo and Quatermain, to the Shakan cast of historical characters, and then further out to such historians as Bishop Callaway, Fred Finney, David Leslie and John Bird, and even to ‘an old traveller in “the Zulu” ’ (x). What this ideally provides is an imaginative sense of an historical ruler who in Haggard’s epithet was both a ‘colossal genius and most evil man’ (ix), or in Fred Finney’s recollection of an old induna’s summation: ‘He was a strange man; nay, a silwana (a wild animal), but we Zulus loved him for all that’ (Finney 1880: I.9). The induna’s silwana is echoed in Galazi and Umslopogaas’s fantastic werewolf shape-shifting and again at the moment when Umslopogaas learns that he is the son of Shaka. Because the love of Umslopogaas for Nada replaces bloodshed with a healing ideal, the characters of Umslopogaas and Shaka emerge as Janus-faced portraits of life and death, each aspect turning back one upon the other in a dying-and-renewing cycle, effectively quickening Pater’s ‘magic web’.3 Nada was so creatively daring that Haggard’s fellow Anglo-African author Bertram Mitford was inspired to write a parallel account of the Ndebele ruler Mzilikazi in The King’s Assegai (1894). Mitford also went on to write three more chronologically successive novels of Ndebele history. Undoubtedly, Haggard originally envisioned Nada as a ‘stand-alone’ narrative of the Zulus under Shaka and his successor, but after Mitford’s tetralogy Haggard seems to have decided on a similar quartet of adventures. Given the imperialist’s pride in the British Empire’s likeness to the Roman imperium, the substantial creative investment of these two writers in the Zulu and Ndebele kingdoms suggests they were seeking a parallel with British imperialism. Haggard juxtaposes the heroic, bloodstained grandeur of the old Zulu kingdom with this new rule with consortium mining, detribalised alcoholic lives, and old warriors ‘grotesque’ with the white ‘castoff garments’ (Haggard 1913: vii), implying the perceived British decline was not civilisation’s turning into its savage opposite but the crushing of souls by commercial practices at home and abroad. Similarly, an old warrior’s refusal to barter or sell his Zulu War assegai to Mitford (in self-mockery a mere collector of trophies and emissary of European commercialisation) evinces resistance to imperial authority and a refusal to betray ancestral spirits and cultural traditions (Mitford 1883: 266–7; 1894a: 1–5).

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Bertram Mitford’s Sign of the Spider: An Episode (1896) Bertram Mitford’s symbol-rich masterpiece challenges the religious and psychological orthodoxy of the 1890s, advancing controversial claims about the legitimacy of pattern respectability and the sources of happiness. Laurence Stanninghame walks out of his unhappy ‘jerry-built semi-detached’ abode (Mitford 1896: 5), with its nagging wife and three noisy children, to invest his dwindling capital in the markets of Johannesburg, circa 1890. On his voyage to South Africa, he meets the enchanting Lilith Ormskirk, whose given name recalls the legendary femme fatale who trapped Adam with her ‘unholy spells’ (23). Mitford would have known Dante Rossetti’s sonnet ‘Lilith’, as paired with his painting ‘Lady Lilith’ (1867–8), that recast the legendary succubus as a ‘modern Lilith’ (Rossetti 1887: 850) who, though seemingly the constructor of an ensnaring web, is equally also its victim. In the corrupt boom-and-bust gold mining market of Jo’burg, Stanninghame loses everything; and, when he is left with no choice but to put a gun to his head, an image of Lilith appears that stays his finger. At this critical moment the slave trader Hazon offers him a final chance at wealth. Hazon’s sobriquet, El Khanac, the Strangler, recalls Rossetti’s image of Lilith’s ‘strangling golden hair’. Stanninghame justifies his deal with the devil because British society, notwithstanding its corrupt, enslaving economic system, ignores its guilt. He sheds all conventional values of goodness, empathy or rule of law, and embraces a philosophy of ‘preyer or preyed upon’ (Mitford 1896: 172) that is strikingly akin to Friedrich Nietzsche’s master–slave paradigm. What avails is only the minimal touchstone of his gentleman’s word as bond, the unbreakable commitment of each adventurer to the other. Society’s taboo makes cannibals a more serviceable Other, yet they are whom Stanninghame knows himself to be: ‘In them, toiling along, wearily, dejectedly, beneath the chain or yoke, he saw himself’ (172). Although he doesn’t carry the chains of his captives, he too is a chattel in the Victorian economic system (compare Scully 1915: 192–3). Captured by the Ba-gcatya, the People of the Spider, but spared seemingly because Lilith’s locket with her spidery monogrammed ‘O’ protects him like an apotropaic fetish (Mitford 1896: 278), Stanninghame entertains illusions he can join the tribe, even marry the princess Lindela. He is unprepared for the horror of his sacrifice to their vampire spider-god, ‘nearly as large as a bear’ (265). With its ‘cruel human face’ (262), this uncannily familiar horror embodies the devouring economics of the slave trade and the customs, institutions or amoral forces of collusion and connivance in respectable London and Johannesburg – such as the diggings of the mining consortiums that voraciously swallow its workers. Stanninghame tries to kill the spider-monster because he cannot recognise in its face his own quest for wealth. Even before Africa, he had served the Victorian spider: he was simply a financial provider for his wife, and for his children his role had been signalled by the toys he showered upon them to fill his absence when in Africa. Lilith’s monogram on her locket and the Spider’s claw marks on its lid are thus not a sign of protection from evil, but the uncanny ‘sign’ of the spider’s possession of Lilith and Stanninghame. Facing a literal devouring, Stanninghame arms himself with the bones of the spider’s previous victims, utilising their skeletal remains for self-defence as the cannibals or Spider devour the human body for food. He stabs and bludgeons the spider, apotheosis of entrapping social institutions such as marriage baited with sexual desire, into momentary submission: his phallic club a human leg bone with a massive band

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of gold at the cusp that he hurls into one of the spider’s diabolic eyes, an emblematic vagina dentata. Although initially Stanninghame’s expedient way of avoiding deathby-spider, the Ba-gcatya maiden Lindela, who rescues him from the spider’s lair, gives him a love entirely beyond Victorian and Ba-gcatya possibilities – free, unbounded by social constraints. Lindela as an African princess defied Ba-gcatya conventions as she knew them: her clan, its laws, its priests, even its protocols of emotional feelings: ‘We girls of the Ba-gcatya do not love – not like this’ (Mitford 1896: 239). And Stanninghame, as an English aristocrat in the far interior, is beyond all 1890s cultural, religious and racial proprieties. Earlier Stanninghame had reproached Lilith at his leave-taking for her belated expression of love and then, as a gentleman unwilling to endanger her social reputation, had sacrificed a passion he believes he now attains. But just as his impoverishment and entanglement in an unsatisfactory marriage had impeded love then, so now this new love is destroyed because he only wounds the hideous spider. About to cross into civilisation, Lindela is fatally bitten as if by a minion that embodied the spidergod’s poison, to which even their aristocratic individualism and disdain for social constraints are no antidote. The spider wins owing to its kinship with the unsuspectingly toxic Stanninghame, who from the very first had linked his ‘sentiments’ and ‘feelings’ (Mitford 1896: 9) to what was bought and sold. Nothing in the resources of 1890s narratives enables those such as Lindela (or, earlier, Haggard’s Foulata) to continue their journey – here and now only death remains. On his way through Capetown homeward to England, Stanninghame encounters Lilith, who has married her cousin George out of a misplaced sense of social duty. Although as a stranger speaking to her on the street he is careful not to compromise her respectability, he believes he has obtained wealth and social position only by doing the complete opposite of what Victorian respectability demanded: ‘Every conventionality violated, every rule of morality, each set aside, had brought him nothing but good – had brought nothing but good to him and his’ (Mitford 1896: 311). However, this ‘good’ is ironic. Like Lilith, who sacrificed her happiness to save a worthless cousin, Stanninghame, rendering unto the spider its due, has had his life’s blood sucked out. He is also relieved that the tender conscience of his youthful associate Holmes has been swallowed by the respectability of Victorian marriage, confession no longer even a remote option. Curiously, the novel’s final pages omit all mention of the nagging wife to whom Stanninghame has returned, almost as if she has been devoured by the maw of opulence. The ‘sign of the spider’ on Lilith’s silver locket testifies that civilisation was never in danger of assuming any new monstrous shape – as truly as for the People of the Spider, Victorian society was already bewitched by the diabolic.

Ernest Glanville’s Fair Colonist (1894) The primary physical and psychological dialectic in Ernest Glanville’s five novels of the 1890s set in Africa is the antithesis between a familiar landscape, rural or urban, and the unexplored, darkly ‘other’ in its midst – those totemic forces opening the door between human and divine, the secular and sacred (Monsman 2011: 327–9). For Glanville, consciousness was intrinsic to the fabric of reality, manifested both in the creatively divine and in the destructively demonic. If the ordinances of spirit signal an intellectual beauty that sinks into the heart – as discerned both by the ‘old Dutch colonists’ and a rogue bull elephant in his ‘Ukutwasa’ (Glanville 1888: 99, 102, 130) – beauty’s

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absence exposes the earth’s unredeemed primordial animality of demonic baboons or the snake-god Ikanti. Since beauty and destruction are each background condition of the other, only by turning the discords against themselves to express rational order can one’s eyes be opened, even apocalyptically as in ‘Ukutwasa’, to the light of a Damascus Christophany. Glanville’s most personal novel, A Fair Colonist (1894), dedicated to his mother, asks what happens when the 1890s new woman succeeds in escaping traditional social restraints but encounters a deeper darkness that threatens the rights to her very own body. The captivating Ada Tamplin, an upper-class British girl, dumps her boring second cousin, Charlie Dorant, because she doesn’t want to be his mere ‘chattle’ (Glanville 1894: 10). Though Charlie has ‘an expression which is the mark of the fin de siècle, self-possessed, cold, and decidedly unpleasant’ (3–4), he is a ‘Rugger’ player, allowing Glanville to editorialise: There are some superior people who pronounce football to be brutal and dangerous. . . . [I]f their system of mollycoddling were adopted, this sturdy, independent race would become . . . fit only for the cult of the lily, and a victim to the silly fads of latter-day reformers. (61) Whilst Charlie is shooting wild partridges, Glanville introduces the figure of a caged bird as Ada’s contrasting icon: ‘I wish I were a man’, she said, with a quick look round and up at the calm, grey sky – such a look as the caged lark makes when it half opens its wings and stoops its head as some free bird cleaves across its vision in the outer air. . . . It seemed to her that women had to stand apart from the play as well as from the business of life, and she resented this. (1) Yet the blind starling that belongs to Dorant’s tenants seems to be contented in its ignorance and darkness – a symbol of the traditional fate of women in the household. Ada emigrates, together with Sally Fitkin, a girl of limited social status and means, to the Eastern Cape to open a dairy and fruit ranch, ‘Orange Grove’. Perhaps Glanville’s ‘experience of South African farm lands’ (Glanville n.d.: 7), allows him to show off the progressive agricultural technology of the two women as part of the anticipated advances in the coming century, such as Sally’s cost-effective and labourefficient dairy or the adoption of lady-bugs in lieu of insecticides. Sally’s brother Amos also has emigrated here to escape the British class system. He believes that in South Africa ‘there is no past’, whereas in England ‘they are working for another upheaval, another revolution of thought at the end of the century, which will bring many an old fetish tumbling to the ground’ (Glanville 1894: 246–7). Appropriately named after the rural prophet who criticised the oppression of the poor and the usurpation of their land, Amos believes his new-found social equality should be extended to the Xhosa as well. In the most philosophical moment of the novel, Amos hypothesises: ‘Man – white and black – was but a bundle of desires continually at war with the force of Order, the maintenance of which appeared to be the highest aim of civilization.’ Whether Glanville is recalling the political theories of Hobbes, Locke or (most likely) Rousseau,

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the central theme of these thinkers was that possessions provoked the aggressions of men who have not transcended the original state of nature. This is focused in the novel on who possesses the land and how; by what force or what agreement? Ada takes it for granted that she and Sally are justified as farm owners and managers because their practical and inventive minds implement a progressive vision of the land’s potential, thus reconciling Africa’s traditional rural past with the cultural transformations of capitalism from which the urban new woman emerged. But a threatening squatter unwittingly throws the bird-image back at Ada in protest: ‘Who says it is your ground? Yours! It belongs to us. . . . Are we less than the birds in the air, who build their nests in the rocks and the trees, and come and go when they will?’ (Glanville 1894: 195). Glanville’s sympathies are obviously split; the features he contributed to newspapers on horticultural topics testify to a lifelong love of the settlers’ farms. Conversely, his posthumous The Hunter (1926) showed he shared with the aboriginal inhabitants a sense of the sacredness to them of their land. A telling incident in A Fair Colonist occurs when the household cat masterfully kills a cobra, the demonic in the fallen orchard-garden of Africa. Later, Amos encounters another cobra and, unlike the young Glanville, who also once gazed into such lethal eyes (Hudson 1894: 530–4), returns its gaze without revulsion or any effort to kill it. By not destroying the snake, Amos converts primitive self-interest into a communal paradigm that ideally serves the rights of men and creatures. But since the snake embodies death, the cat (whose violence may be compared to the summary justice administered by Field-Cornet Gardner) is better adapted to current colonial practice than Amos or Ada. W. C. Scully, suffering sudden pangs for having killed a brave and beautiful oryx, once observed that ‘conventional ethics belonged, after all, to an environment I no longer inhabited. Where I then lived and moved and had my being, the unmoral standards of primeval man prevailed’ (Scully 1915: 47). Courageous within Xhosa kraal or colonial courtroom, the girl who had gone to Africa to prove she was as able as a man is abducted, with implied sexual assault, by the ‘man-monkey’ witch doctor Egquira (Glanville 1894: 294) and by his ‘Tikoloshe familiar, . . . more like a baboon than a man’ (144), who in folklore preys sexually on women. The plot climaxes as Amos and a Gaika companion track the abductors into a sombre valley, a limen between settlement and primordial wilderness. Glanville’s account dramatises the paranoia of an indigenous sexual threat as a decensus into the arms of this chimerical wizard, who avows: ‘I have gazed into the terrible eyes of Ikanti the serpent, and therein, as in a pool of fire, I saw all things’ (295). In ‘Ukutwasa’ Ikanti’s primordial force ultimately becomes weighted with a new emphasis on ethical and inward light, but here Glanville describes Ada’s ‘loud, despairing cry’ (298). From this anguish Ada either may attain to hierological gnosis or else return home in fear to become a mere entity in the service of lifeless social forces. After a terrific fight in which both rescuers are frightfully wounded, but during which Ada escapes from her captivity, the wizard immolates himself. Ada’s innocence is gone, especially her unquenchable desire for personal independence: I have misjudged myself, . . . for I thought I could live by myself, and for myself, taking pleasure from work, and now I long for the old life. . . . Within the age since I left England, a long long time it seems, I have lost something, I know not what. (Glanville 1894: 312)

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If Africa gave Ada as new woman hope for freedom of choice and action, it had perils to her well-being that the class system of British society held in check. She finds fear in the violence of primordial nature, unlike the cat that deals pre-emptively with the cobra or Gardner who uses vigilante justice outside the legal system – or even scrappy Charlie Dorant. Her supreme challenge was to look into Ikanti’s pools of fire, into the vortex of hell, and to acknowledge a truth to which she would rather be as blind as Dickie the starling: that is, fallen nature’s ineradicable violence upon which both her comfortable farm and the wealth of empire are erected. Only by facing that ungovernable instability of an enemy already within could Ada glimpse the synergies of a rational order and peace. Despite Amos’s growing love for Ada, which she tacitly encouraged, her safety comes at a high price when class structures drive a wedge between them. Back in England she retreats into a genteel marriage, perhaps even more lacklustre than the one with Dorant she had originally rejected, ‘content to glide on’, herself now like the blind starling. Amos, whose ideal of a regulated society is certainly not class-ridden England, nevertheless through self-doubt has become in that environment ‘resolute to efface himself’ (Glanville 1894: 328). This ending parallels Mitford’s Forging the Blades (1908) in which, like Ada, Verna is threatened by Chief Sapazani, who intends to add her to his isigodhlo, but she escapes to England as wife of Alaric, a big game hunter, almost like one of his trophies. Although Verna’s Africa ‘glows with life’ (Mitford 1908: 172), she finishes touring her husband’s dead animal museum, contemplating not the exhilarating dangers of living beasts but their stuffed bodies.

Henry Merriman’s With Edged Tools (1894) With Edged Tools by Henry Merriman (whose actual name was Hugh Stowell Scott) is a ‘lost’ highlight of African adventure, a forgotten vignette of fin-de-siècle social mores wedded to character in action. The story’s psychology and situations embrace every single issue of the 1890s: masculinity and femininity, exploration and imperial trade, race, criminality, wealth. Perhaps because Merriman/Scott began his adult career as a maritime underwriter at his father’s firm, which later included membership in Lloyd’s of London, he became an inveterate traveller; and in his authorial voice he credibly asserts his first-hand experience of Africa (Merriman 1894: 2.86). In this story Jack Meredith and Guy Oscard, both unwittingly in love with the same woman, travel separately to Africa to find the wealth that will allow a gentleman to marry. The two share typical features of the adventure hero, yet emerge not as stilted stereotypes but as convincing representatives of a breed that actually once existed. W. V. Burgess observed that Merriman’s novel was ‘by some considered his finest effort as a story, swinging as it does from extreme to extreme – from a scented civilisation to shuddering barbarity, from the finesse of high-life intrigue, to the brutalities of wild life and fortune-hunting’ (Burgess 1904: 293). The novel opens in medias res with Sir John Meredith’s reply to the unheard observation of Lady Cantourne, aunt of the social belle Millicent Chyne, that her niece only needs more ‘heart’ to make a good marriage; that is, she does not yet have the discipline to love wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, Jack’s father does not take Millicent’s coquetry in the spirit with which Oscar Wilde or Alexander Pope satirised Gwendolen or Belinda’s frivolities; thus after Jack’s secret engagement, Sir John in a

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brutal dispute carried out with icy decorum cuts him off without an allowance. Jack’s situation owes a debt to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, whose hero had also been disinherited by a strong-willed father because of his love for an inappropriate young lady. Merriman’s apparent arriere pensée is the alarming liberty of the new woman: ‘Here was a love – it may be modern, advanced, chic, fin-de-siècle, up-to-date, or anything the coming generation may choose to call it – but it was eminently cheap and ephemeral because it could not make a little sacrifice of vanity’ (Merriman 1894: III.83). But Merriman also burlesques the stiff traditionalism of Sir John, who sits in a straight-backed chair and approves of afternoon tea only for ladies (III.60). About Jack, Sir John observes cattily: ‘I did not know that he was endeavoring to work. I only trust it is not manual labour – it is so injurious to the fingernails’ (II.16). After Jack goes to Africa, Millicent ensnares the heart of socially inept Guy Oscard, who, before he too leaves, naively assumes they have an agreement. Her ‘vanity’ as a fashion of the social whirl seems her principal motivation, not Oscard’s guaranteed income (Cox 1967: 55). When Jack arrives in Loango on the malarial west coast of Central Africa, he stays with the trading station manager, Maurice Gordon, and his quietly attractive sister, Jocelyn. Dramatically juxtaposing primitive Loango with the drawing-rooms of London’s Grovesnor Square, Merriman’s settings resonate as spoton descriptions by a close observer. Some romanticising of African scenes depicting the far interior may be felt, but Loango as ‘place’ is first-hand: somnolent, barren, enigmatical, ‘accursed’ (Merriman 1894: I.162). Victor Durnovo, a shady figure who has been involved in criminal undertakings with Maurice in the past, proposes an expedition to harvest in the far interior a ‘strength-giving herb’, simiacine (III.229). Since the 1880s, medicinal plants in colonial and postcolonial Africa had been commercially valuable; and although simiacine’s botanical virtues are here somewhat exaggeratedly extolled, the quest for this fictional stimulant credibly drives the adventure. Although Merriman’s descriptive episodes between dialogue may be lengthy, they are piquant and visually alive. And censure of his fiction for lacking ‘precision of language’ (R. Pound, quoted in Sutherland 1989: 561) is refuted by tightly drawn scenes, such as those where paddles are heard on the river, and where Merriman particularises Marie’s emotional sensitivity as a literal listening ‘for some distant sound’ (Merriman 1894: II.79). His characterisations clearly gain from numerous sharp contrasts: Millicent the flirt and Jocelyn the soulful; Jack the impulsive and Sir John the stiffly reserved; or Marie, as gracious and pure as her husband is brutal and criminal. Although the meeting of separate men in Africa who are unwittingly in love with the same woman in London is indeed a coincidence, the Victorian novelist understood that fiction was a supplement to reality and valued such fortuitous rivalry in love as an extraordinary, quickening construct. Initially stalking each other unawares as ‘hunter and hunted’, Jack and Guy simultaneously shoot a suddenly springing leopard. As it lies ‘beautiful, incomparably graceful and sleek even in death’, Jack wipes the blood ‘gently, almost affectionately’, from its face before taking its skin as a sign the hunters are bonded in ‘much of a muchness’ (I.205–10). This friendship, tight as that of Jonathan and David, is created by the shared shedding of the leopard’s blood; Millicent by contrast, beautiful as the leopard, has a sterile ‘heart’ that could only split comrades apart in rivalry. If Lady Cantourne and Millicent are typified by their social and dramatic circumstances, Marie is set in sharpest contrast with Loango. In a violent society, rampant with disease, caught in a bleak and loveless marriage, she remains ‘dignified, gentle,

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self-possessed’ (II.224). Here we have the subaltern as a person in her own right; her values real but not proclaimed; her sorrows deep but never sentimentalised; her strengths large yet intense. Or is she, from the perspective of grievance politics, merely ‘well-behaved’? Certainly Marie surpasses the heroine Jocelyn in human force as, say, Rebecca surpasses Rowena in Scott’s Ivanhoe. Like Rebecca, Marie unites traits of her cultures, West African and Portuguese; and although maltreated specifically by race, she symbolises also the oppression of women low in the social hierarchy. Yet with her children Marie has the only healthy parent–child relationship in the novel. In Merriman’s obituaries and, even earlier in Blackwood’s Magazine, reviewers had cited ‘his habit of carping at women, especially modern women, which . . . is as inartistic as it is unchivalrous to introduce these Mephistophelean sneers where they have no bearing on the plot’ (Gregg 1897: 228). Although such lack of ‘bearing on the plot’ may seem inconceivable to many readers, each character’s life is so authentic as to isolate the author’s quirky editorialisings, as if his misgivings were an afterthought. But perhaps this is no more inartistic than John Milton’s explicit reminders (notably unheeded subsequently by Blake and Shelley) that his readers should despise Satan? The simiacine adventure is perilous but wildly profitable; however, Durnovo is repeatedly treacherous: he flees the camp in the face of a smallpox outbreak, is grossly negligent of Marie’s welfare, attempts to blackmail Jocelyn with her brother’s slavetrading, and finally criminally destroys the enterprise by forcing slaves to harvest the crop, even casually killing one – at which the two adventurers forsake the project entirely. In an image of the gothic violence underpinning economic profits, Merriman describes Durnovo the next time he appears; the maltreated slaves have had their vengeance: The thing that stood there – sickening their gaze – was not a human being at all. Take a man’s eyelids away, leaving the round balls staring, blood-streaked; cut away his lips, leaving the grinning teeth and red gums; sheer off his ears – that which is left is not a man at all. This had been done to Victor Durnovo. (Merriman 1894: III.42) Simultaneously Victor is slowly dying of fever from the bite of the tsetse fly, his central nervous system collapsing as the disease progresses. Slaving, a capital offence in the British Empire, was ‘a dangerous story to tell’ (III. 221). So for politic reasons his fatal mutilation is described as sleeping sickness – satire approaching that of Marlow’s lie to the Intended in Heart of Darkness or, in Conrad’s earlier ‘Outpost of Progress’, of Makolo’s pointing at Carlier’s bullet in the eye: ‘He died of fever’ (Conrad 1898: 166). By invoking the old proverb first recorded in Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588) – ‘It is ill jesting with edged tools’ – Merriman’s title shows his contempt for the mask of double-dealing, whether Durnovo’s or Millicent’s. The reviewer in Black and White cites ‘that strong scene where Millicent, among a riot of wedding presents and wedding preparations, is confronted with the two gentlemen she has betrayed’ (Black and White, 27 October (1894): 533). Abandoned on the spot with impeccable civility by both men, Millicent, whose enchanting sexuality had been Lilith’s, perhaps ‘realised the fact that such creatures may be led blindly, helplessly, with a single hair, but that hair may snap at any moment’ (Merriman 1894: III.212). Thus the bullets that killed the leopard prefigured this ‘snap’ of her hair. And so begins Jack’s gnosis,

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not to repeat a passion that drove him to the wilderness but to build a new love from ancestral models. Millicent in her world of uninhibited frolic and festivity was everything that Jocelyn is not; but the implication is that Jocelyn will come to display those qualities of strength, intensity or purpose that an 1890s woman should possess. Although the ancient chivalric values of the warrior had decreasing relevance in an 1890s context, the modern gentleman-adventurer’s code survived. In Merriman’s feudalism, Sir John and Jack are ‘great types’ of Norman knights (I.134–35) and Jocelyn is a ‘Saxon beauty’ (III.263, II.24). For Walter Scott, Norman and Saxon together formed England when the British Isles first spoke the same tongue. Jack’s ordeal is to witness in Millicent the disintegration of belief and order at the century’s end but to bring his authentic chivalrous self into unity with his history, returning home with Jocelyn as his wife.

W. C. Scully’s Between Sun and Sand (1898) William Charles Scully’s Between Sun and Sand (1898) is an ‘etho-adventure’ in the arid region of savannas along the Namib and South African west coast. After various stints that included prospecting for diamonds in 1871 with Cecil Rhodes, Scully served as a magistrate variously in the Orange Free State, the Eastern Cape and Namaqualand. This story, with its enlivening local colour, exhibits his thorough knowledge of the Namaqua desert and also reveals his preference for strong and vividly grotesque incidents. His plot at first sight is elemental, with no superfluities, a straightforward vehicle for description and character, and its style has a similar le-mot-juste essentialism – energetic, clear, unembellished, its impact immediate and enduring. The epigraph from Adelbert van Chamisso implies that its interlocked events can be simultaneously both comic and tragic. Thus the comedic elements of love and marriage (which involve not just the heroine but her ‘evil’ stepsisters of folklore) have their counterpoint in a tragedy begotten by greed and murder. This contrapuntal pattern is echoed throughout: in ephemeral flowers on ancient rocks, the young girl under a prehistoric kokerboom aloe, poverty with diamonds, deadly aridity and life-giving rain, a brutal social system alongside the terror and ecstasy of nature’s sublimity. One is tempted to speculate that the atmosphere of the African desert (meteorological or literary) might constitute Scully’s main plot; but since the shopkeeper Max Steinmetz links the human lines of action, his role perforce defines the central interest of what contrastively lies ‘between sun and sand’ – not oases or dust-devils or oven-like heat but human life, its loves and hates. Max is an impoverished immigrant who has left the overcrowded East End of London for his brother’s trading post in the desert. There, during the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, semi-nomadic ‘trekboers’ of Dutch extraction pastured their goats and sheep in areas of summer rainfall, moving in the winter to the coastal regions. Max falls in love with Susannah, a trekboer girl, under the sturdy, slow-growing kokerboom. Ethologists call this tree a ‘cultural keystone species’ owing to its unaltered persistence through time and its connection with the daily life of the indigenous peoples. It flowers in July in its extremely arid habitats: the yellow buds which a few of its less mature twigs had put forth tentatively, as though half ashamed of such frivolity, burst open and sent forth a faint show of pollen, which fell like a spangling of gold-dust upon Susannah’s hair. (Scully 1898: 39)

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These unfolding buds are linked with the young girl’s emergent sexuality, perhaps not unlike the golden shower of Danae. The ‘hoar-ancient’ tree delightedly supplies Cupid’s sharp arrow, the ‘venomous nip’ (38–9) of a centipede that defines Max’s heroic ordeal as comic and romantic, not tragic and deadly. Max is the only one willing to hire the starving Gert Gemsbok, a Khoisan, who is ostracised by the trekboers for telling the truth in a law court about one of their own. Gemsbok is the namesake of the most elegant of desert antelopes, the gemsbok or oryx, and the name hints too at his dangerous secret of six diamonds found in the shoe-soles of a dead man tied to a raft about to go over the Orange River falls. Gert is a ramkie instrumentalist of exceptional sensitivity; he and the graceful antelopes slaughtered by the trekboers as much for sport as for their biltong are both victims of an ‘unreasoning cruelty’ (Scully 1898: 76). Gert’s improvisational duets with Oom Schulpad (78–9) had represented a cultural harmony that otherwise was lacking in the Namaqua desert. Max’s older brother Nathan, owner of the trading station and dealer in illegal ostrich feathers, deliberately encourages a fatal attack on Gert by Koos Bester, and Gert is stomped to death in revenge for his ‘crime of truth-telling’ (54). The patriarchal trekboer, Old Schalk, so hopelessly ignorant that he makes Jews and Catholics together scapegoats for the crucifixion of Christ, re-enacts the original sin of Jesus’s killers by creating victims to rid the community of its social outsiders. Not only does Schalk accuse Max of violating the taboo of racial mixing by proposing to marry Susannah, but as Assistant Field Cornet, Schalk deputises for the magistrate (one of the empire’s administrators, and a role that would be occupied by Scully) by investigating Gert’s murder and closing ranks with the guilty trekboer. Schalk makes the victim liable for his own death, discovering only clean consciences and no victim at all. His arrogance is emphasised by the poignancy of Gert’s smashed ramkee buried beside his body: in this society justice and the potency of beauty are scorned – a colonial commonplace reminiscent of Waldo’s comment on the Bushman’s cave art and the trek of the springbok in Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (Schreiner 1883: 17–18). Scully’s titling subsequent chapters with phrases from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes makes clear that justice for Nathan and Koos does not await some eventual imperial judgement. The earth, not in its benevolent manifestation of rain and life but in its diabolic aspect of thirst, hallucination and death, becomes their executioner. They give themselves over to death by a greed and guilt that Scully embodies in a spidermonster sand dune (Scully 1898: 128). After Koos maroons Nathan on the dune and the jackals clean him to his bones, his remains are returned in a sack hung in a fork of the koekerboom, pending the arrival of the Special Magistrate. This ‘Thing’ hanging in its sack is like some Biblically accursed conspirator: Haman, Absalom or Judas. A corresponding nemesis overtakes Koos Bester when his conscience drives him into the desert beneath ‘the accusing stars’ (218). Here the diamonds enshrined in Gemsbok’s name return, along with the dead man’s haunting music, to pursue Koos with ‘the torch of a tracking fiend’ (224). He is brought home from the dunes by his wife the day following his mental breakdown: ‘It was late at night when she arrived at the camp, with the corpse of her husband tied, stiff and stark, on the seat beside her’ (226). This gothic image of wife and husband, living and dead, riding home as if in some allegorical painting of personified Judgement, symbolises a sinner delivered by the chariot of death to hell.

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At the conclusion both Max and Susannah are increasingly absorbed in the commercial side of the imperial enterprise, intimated by their more-worldly visages. Max intends to appeal to Susannah’s vanity and have Gert’s blood diamonds cut and made into a necklace, so that he may attempt to bribe Susannah with this to reconsider her decision never to leave her beloved Bushmanland. . . . If Susannah’s command of the English language improves, it is quite possible that the effect of the necklet may be all that Max desires. (Scully 1898: 236) Nature’s diamonds, defiled by murder, then processed in the marketplace, further portend the young couple’s objectification as conforming bourgeoisie. But since Scully’s novel is a tragicomedy, Susannah’s fate by going or staying could be joyous, tragic or both.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness together with its prologue, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1897), represents a redaction of his personal experiences as a steamer captain on the River Congo in 1890. Both adventure tales are parodies of bringing ‘the sacredness of civilising work’ (Conrad 1898: 137) to Africa in the form of disintegrating ideals, unethical policies and dehumanising commerce. The prologue’s ‘tall cross’ above the mounded grave of the snuffed out ‘energetic artist’ (126), predecessor of the two white traders at the Kassai trading post, leaned ‘much out of the perpendicular’ (125), its tilt suggesting that in the Congo the spiritual values of the imperial enterprise are expressed only through a tipsy creator. Absent the Creator, nature collapses back into ‘a great emptiness. . . . The river . . . flowed through a void’ (133). All that remains of Christianity resides in the aged chief Gobila’s garbled fetishism, an arrestingly sardonic version in which God himself confusedly re-emerges as ‘Father Gobila’, ‘old and incomprehensible’ (138–9). Kayerts, Carlier and the ‘Poor Devil’ of the dead artist comically appear transfigured by African animism in old Gobila’s mind as subordinate devil-deities of animistic polytheism, an unconscious parody of the consubstantial and co-eternal Persons of the Trinitarian Godhead. If old Gobila’s fetishism fantastically revises the creedal cornerstone of the First Council of Nicaea to display Christianity as ‘gone native’, in Heart of Darkness Kurtz himself undergoes an African spiritual transformation that to Western eyes is equally bizarre. Neither culture construes the other correctly. The mainstream interpretation of Kurtz depicts a paragon of civilisation who in his African isolation has lost enlightened Western rationality and plunged into madness, and this assimilation to ‘dark places’ among savages is an embarrassment to colonial power. But from an African perspective he may be something quite different; and how his final words play out, other than as a prefiguration of his damnation, depends on who knows what about him – a reflection of each observer’s preoccupations. Thus for the external narrator Kurtz has accompanied Charon ‘to the uttermost ends of the earth . . . into an immense darkness’ (Conrad 1902: 182); for the middle station operatives and Belgian bureaucracy he is a rumour, an enigma, ‘remarkable’ but with ‘unsound method’ (156); for the Russian a sort of Übermensch; for the Intended a chaste and saintly genius; for Marlow a hollow, egotistical madman. But for his tribe and ‘the barbarous and superb woman’ who grieves at his

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vanishing, he embodies a vital agency. Initially Marlow’s steamer is greeted by ‘a cry, a very loud cry, as of infinite desolation’ (115–16), and when the boat leaves, his mistress ‘stretched tragically her bare arms after us’ (166). Just as romantic writers employ imagination to grasp reality, so also ambiguities enlarge access to new meanings on the edge of insight. Since Marlow prioritises the rationality of Western perspectives, he assumes that Kurtz like all superstitious savages lacks the European heart of belief – ‘hollow at the core’ (Conrad 1902: 149). But Kurtz and his consort, not unlike Solomon and Sheba, may open an alternative possibility to the British fear of imperial decline: the rekindling of vision by confrontation with the primordial. When an author creates a character or incident, it belongs less to consciously controlled intentions than to embedded memories from reading, hearsay or eyewitness accounts. Perhaps like his impressionable Jim on the Patna, Conrad too had ‘hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure’, of ‘valorous deeds’ which ‘had a gorgeous virility’ that ‘passed before him with an heroic tread’ (Conrad 1900: 58). At the threshold where such subliminal memories intersect with creative inspiration, fiction and circumstance combine to evoke borrowings, like Conrad’s echo of the historical chief ‘Papa Gobila’ whom H. M. Stanley popularised in The Congo (1885), or Marlow on the yacht seated like a Buddha, recounting his guilt as if he were Coleridge’s ancient mariner. Conrad frequently ironises such ambiguous figures, but here Kurtz eludes Marlow’s practical acumen and possibly Conrad’s ostensible intentions. Double irony, in which words become literally purposive, yields an uncanny figure who resists inscription into a colonial role. To represent Kurtz, who has ‘taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land’ (Conrad 1902: 132), Conrad subliminally but recognisably appropriated the witch doctor’s spiritual initiation and vocation. Glanville’s story ‘Ukutwasa’ (1888) supports this interpretation; its title (from uku to be + thwasa reborn) is the Xhosa-Zulu word for the creative crisis of the witch doctor as novitiate, a period of dream and initiation sickness believed to be a call from his ancestors ‘to come out’ or to be born anew in their service. Ukutwasa or ukuthwasa is also similarly applied to the new moon emerging from the old: In Africa, the kaffir ‘witch doctors’ affirm that they are called to the profession by a supernatural agency. A candidate goes into seclusion, allows his hair to grow very long, does not paint his face or body, and becomes very emaciated by fasting. His experiences then, are called ‘ukutwasa’ or moon changes, and he is said to be ‘twasa’, or changing; in other words, his spiritual eyes are opened. (‘Black Magic’, Gleaner, 18 August 1925: 32; see Haggard 1892: 12) Whereas twenty-first-century Xhosa cultural studies define this traditional diviner as a community healer, Glanville’s witch doctor Umtaphina – ‘the Ukutwasa, man of the spirit-world’ or ‘spirit-doctor’ (Glanville 1888: 108–9, 119) – belongs to the intenser realm of spirits. Conrad’s Kurtz and Glanville’s Umtaphina (until his final Western conversion-twasa) are given a fully pejorative colonial interpretation. These authors understandably elide Kurtz and Umtaphina with the demonic witch or sorcerer, inasmuch as even current Xhosa anthropologists admit there is a very thin line separating the inspired calling of dreams from simple insanity. Moreover, countless innocent people had been killed by the old Xhosa doctors’ practice of ‘smelling out’ witches, illustrated

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by Rider Haggard’s figure of Gagool in King Solomon’s Mines, not to mention that also in the early 1850s a Xhosa doctor had organised an army to drive out the British settlers. Clearly, for the settler or adventurer, then, to be reborn as a diviner by ancestral dreams may be closer to the turnabouts of Dr Henry Jekyll and Mr Edward Hyde. Current anthropological consensus defends the coherence of traditional tribal rituals that in the 1890s had been considered irrational superstition. Marlow describes the shrunken heads which surround Kurtz’s abode, enclosing it in a grim circle of ritualised death. As illogical as such slaughter may be to Western sensibilities, bloodshed effectuated the intervention of the sacred into human affairs. Its ritual enactment lifted it above rational questioning for the participants; it rejuvenated the dialectic between ancestral spirits and tribal members, reaffirmed the life-giving power relationships of the group episteme, and sustained the balance between animals and humans, young and old, male and female, sacred and profane, friend and enemy. Marlow, assuming that Kurtz was destroyed by avarice and bloodthirstiness, pronounces him hollow, merely the West’s way of explaining his pile of ivory. Here one could easily side with Chinua Achebe by pointing out that this echo of a particular type of African religious transformation as mere ‘insanity’ might be an instance of cultural stereotyping (Achebe 1977). Robbie McLaughlan helpfully cites Carl Jung on the European image of the crazed witch doctor as presiding over an African dreamscape and portal to be exploited in the exploration of the Western psyche. Yet he also understood dreaming as an avenue to transcendental emancipation, which reconfigures dreams as a psychic act of defiance that thwarts an ideological order demanding total indoctrination. (McLaughlan 2012: 117–18) Even for Marlow, Kurtz is ‘remarkable’ (Conrad 1902: 171) because, like the Romans who ‘were men enough to face that darkness’ (56), he looked as unswervingly as the wizards Umtaphina or Egquira into the heart of creation’s suffering and death, into the terrible eyes of Ikanti, and ‘as in a pool of fire . . . saw all things’ (Glanville 1894: 295). If violence in Heart of Darkness is usually narrated obliquely, either inscribed onto bodies (from Fresleven in the grass onward to Kurtz’s heads on stakes) or invoked as mood (like the futility of coastal shelling), then the cartographic serpent of the Director’s office may plausibly slither from the wall to take its traditional place directly as the witch doctors’ sacred fetish. Kurtz understood the devastating reality of that snake and articulated the cosmic price of rebirth in and through the ouroboros of life-indeath. Thus he has something true to say about existence itself: ‘The horror! The horror!’ (Conrad 1902: 168). Lying to the Intended about Kurtz’s last utterance of her name, Marlow unheroically whitewashes his experience of darkness because he will not or cannot open her eyes to its conflicted core. He buries her alive in the ‘whited sepulcher’ (Conrad 1902: 62) of empire, blighted chastity narcissistically rotting in the horror of her own name. But Kurtz, embodying an alternative African role, is not entirely effaced by Marlow’s complicit Eurocentric literary imagination. Kurtz’s vision is not regretted savagery engendered by material greed but an antithetical and heroic acknowledgement of demonic forces everywhere. He emerges as a subliminal figure of African power, resistant to European ‘progress’. If for Kurtz the horror remains undefeated, the struggle truly to name and so to face the Fates is enough to clear the field for new possibilities.

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Conclusion Scientific materialism’s technical and psychological control of nature and humanity bequeathed to the era its anxiety. The threnody of each of these six profiled adventure novels is for symbols of a vanishing spiritual life. Their narratives ultimately suggest not fears of atavistic descents but something closer to Bryce’s ‘new fields’. Through the burning eyes of Ikanti and behind the unreasoning mask of the Spider’s ‘cruel human face’, the adventure hero sought to discover the revitalising synergy within the underlying brokenness of fin-de-siècle culture. This battle of the human soul to turn an aimless physical reality back upon itself into ongoing images of renewal was possible only where the legendary could still be experienced as history. What Africa offered to the adventure writers was a people able to read their own daily lives in fables and myths, in dark superstitions and primitive spiritual passions. By Africa’s imaginative agency the adventure writers could resist modernism’s yoke of bondage, its deterministic entanglement. There the hero could still engage ‘as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare’. Further, even after the vanishing of Africa’s ‘ancient mysteries’ (Haggard 1894: 762), ‘true’ adventure narratives of historical happenings recovered for readers moments not yet sucked dry by the markets of European capitalism. The adventure hero, journeying between horror and the knowledge of what it means to be ‘human’, still quests, strives and ultimately dies; but death is not sad, for that glimpse of possibilities beyond the pools of fire makes a human being sublime.

Notes 1. In boys’ adventures, such as those of G. A. Henty, the view of the empire is meant to drive the imperial agenda. Only an exceptional subversive mentor, such as Bloody Bill in Ballentyne’s Coral Island (1858) or Long John Silver in Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), imparts life’s subversive lessons to Ralph Rover and Jim Hawkins. In Buchan’s Prester John (1910), Davie Crawfurd (Scots and orphaned like Hawkins) is ‘mesmerized’ by his blood-bonded double, John Laputa the rebel, ‘strange, and great, and moving, and terrible’ (1910: 182, 328). 2. In his Preface to The Gun-Runner (1893) Mitford says his narrative presents ‘a vanishing page’ of the ‘ultimate downfall of the finest and most intelligent race of savages in the world – now, thanks to the “beneficent” policy of England, crushed and “civilized” out of all recognition’ (vi). Both Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1957) are in perfect accord with the adventure writers. Plaatje, the first Afro-English novelist and admirer of Haggard, intended to print ‘Sechuana folk-tales, which, with the spread of European ideas, are fast being forgotten’ (n.d.: vii); this was his third project to preserve traditional Bantu stories and poems. Achebe said of his vanishing indigenous heritage that he wrote ‘to set the score right about my ancestors’ (Awoonor 1975: 252). Mainstream interpretations tendentiously suggest that all Anglo-African fiction, and even Victorian philology’s recovery of native languages as reflected in the linguistic themes of adventure novels, does not preserve African culture but promotes racial ideologies that hasten its extinction (see, for example, Brantlinger 2003: passim). 3. The metaphysical outcome for the heroic adventurer is the transformation of the material world by a mental perspective so that the underlying ‘diabolic’ brokenness (dyo- two, diaacross, apart + ballein to throw) of physical creation, its ‘bloodshed’ that darkens life at its source, becomes the precondition for a quickening ‘symbolic’ (syn/m- with, together + ballein)

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glimpse of the orderings of Spirit. This reciprocal arrangement of life-in-death and death-inlife is a figure/ground gestalt in which each state by reversal supports the other; in their totality ‘closure’ is never literal but imaginatively visualised. The hero’s gnosis is thus to turn the forms of chaos against themselves so as to foresee this new order within the destructive forces of history.

Works Cited Achebe, C. (1977), ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, Massachusetts Review, 18: 782–94. Awoonor, K. (1975), The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara, Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday. Brantlinger, P. (2003), Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Brantlinger, P. (1985), ‘Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880–1914’, English Literature in Transition, 28. 3: 243–52. Buchan, J. (1940), Memory Hold the Door, London: J. M. Dent. Buchan, J. (1910), Prester John, London: T. Nelson & Sons. Buchan, J. (1906), A Lodge in the Wilderness, Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons. Burgess, W. V. (1904), ‘Henry Seton Merriman, Novelist’, Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, 31: 291–9 Conrad, J. (1902), ‘Heart of Darkness’, in J. Conrad, Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories, Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, pp. 65–158. Conrad, J. (1900), Lord Jim: A Tale, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. Conrad, J. (1898), ‘An Outpost of Progress’, in J. Conrad, Tales of Unrest, London: Unwin, pp. 124–70. Cox, H. T. (1967), Henry Seton Merriman, New York: Twayne. Dante Alighieri (1914), Purgatory: The Divine Comedy, trans. H. F. Cary, vol. 20, New York: P. F. Collier & Son. Doyle, C. A. (1896/7), ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley’, in P. Addleshaw et al., Stories by English Authors: Africa, New York: Scribner’s, pp. 3–12. Finney, F. B. (1880), Zululand and the Zulus, Maritzburg: Horne Bros. Glanville, E. ([?1921] n.d.), Smartt Syndicate Ltd. Farms: Britstown, Cape Province, Johannesburg: Argus. Glanville, E. (1897), Tales from the Veld, London: Chatto and Windus. Glanville, E. (1896), Kloof Yarns, London: Chatto and Windus. Glanville, E. (1894), A Fair Colonist, London: Chatto and Windus. Glanville, E. (1888), Among the Cape Kaffirs: (1) On the Border; (2) Ukutwasa, London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey. Gregg, H. (1897), ‘The Indian Mutiny in Fiction’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 161: 218–31. Haggard, H. R. (1980), The Private Diaries of Sir Henry Rider Haggard, ed. D. S. Higgins, London: Cassell. Haggard, H. R. (1913), Child of Storm, London: Cassell. Haggard, H. R. (1894), ‘“Elephant Smashing” and “Lion Shooting” ’, African Review, 9 June: 762–3. Haggard, H. R. (1892), Nada the Lily, London: Longmans, Green. Haggard, H. R. (1887a), Allan Quatermain, London: Longmans, Green. Haggard, H. R. (1887b), She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green Haggard, H. R. (1885), King Solomon’s Mines, London: Cassell. Hudson, W. H. (1894), ‘The Serpent’s Strangeness’, Fortnightly Review, n.s. 55: 530–4.

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Lewis C. S. (1960), ‘Haggard Rides Again’, Time and Tide, 3 September: 1044–5. McLaughlan, R. (2012), Re-Imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Merriman, S. H. (1894), With Edged Tools, 3 vols, London: Smith, Elder. Mitford, B. (1908), Forging the Blades, London: Eveleigh Nash. Mitford, B. (1896), The Sign of the Spider: An Episode, London: Methuen. Mitford, B. (1894a), The King’s Assegai, London: Chatto and Windus. Mitford, B. (1894b), Renshaw Fanning’s Quest, London: Chatto and Windus. Mitford, B. (1893), The Gun-Runner, London: Chatto and Windus. Mitford, B. (1883), Through the Zulu Country, London: Kegan Paul. Monsman, G. (2011), ‘The Early Empire Fiction of Ernest Glanville: On the Border’, English Literature in Transition, 54. 3: 315–36. Monsman, G. (2010), Colonial Voices, New Orleans: University Press of the South. Pater, W. (1873), Studies in the History of the Renaissance, London: Macmillan. Plaatje, S. T. ([?1930] n.d.), Mhudi, Alice: Lovedale Press. Rossetti, D. G. (1887), Complete Poetical Works, vol. 2, ed. W. M. Rossetti, Boston: Roberts Brothers. Schreiner, O. (1923), Thoughts on South Africa, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Schreiner, O. (1897), Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Schreiner, O. [‘Ralph Iron’] (1883), The Story of an African Farm, new edn, London: Chapman and Hall. Scully, W. C. (1915), Lodges in the Wilderness, London: Herbert Jenkins. Scully, W. C. (1898), Between Sun and Sand, Cape Town: J. C. Juta. Sutherland, J. (1989), ‘Scott, Hugh Stowell’, in J. Sutherland, Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 561. Tylor, E. B. (1871), Primitive Culture, vol. 1, London: John Murray. Woolf, V. (1925), ‘Modern Fiction’, in V. Woolf, The Common Reader: First Series, London: Hogarth Press, pp. 184–95.

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22 The Fin-de-Siècle Detective: ‘But My Job Don’t End There’ Caroline Reitz

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irginia Woolf’s 1941 novel Between the Acts features an historical pageant. A Victorian constable represents the nineteenth century. This law-and-order professional policeman, ‘directing the traffic of ’Er Majesty’s Empire’ (Woolf 1970: 161), is an improvement on the cruelly bumbling beadle in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist published at the start of the Victorian period. However, as imagined by Woolf, the constable represents a repressive figure attempting order and stability in a rapidly changing world. The nineteenth century was a time of great change for the English police and attitudes about them. The century began without an official police force in England; London would be the last major European city to have an organised police when Sir Robert Peel’s 1829 Metropolitan Police Act was passed. A small detective unit was formed around 1842, which is when the Oxford English Dictionary cites the first usage of the word ‘detective’. By the century’s end, the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard would have over eight hundred officers. These detectives would have been patrolling the streets amidst, in G. M. Young’s words, ‘the swirl and wreckage of new ideas and old beliefs’ (1969: 165). The century’s most famous detective, albeit a private one, is Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, whose dates, 1887–1927, cover any sense of what is meant by the fin de siècle, and who would be on the cover of any book on the fin de siècle detective, the embodiment of the period for any future historical pageants. What does it mean for an era to be represented by a figure of law and order? It certainly means that one of the culture’s core values is order. As George Orwell explains in his essay ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’: ‘If one must worship a bully, it is better that he should be a policeman than a gangster’ (1956: 144). It also means that the culture feels anxious about the chaos that representatives of such order are tasked with managing. This speaks to a more general understanding of the fin de siècle as an anxious ‘age of transition’; in Peter Keating’s words: ‘an indeterminate stretch of some thirty or forty years’ that is ‘lodged precariously’ between the Victorian period and modernism and defined by a ‘mood’ of ‘confusion and uncertainty’ (1989: 1). This is not just a view in the historical rear-view mirror; according to Arthur Symons in 1893, it was a period characterised by ‘intense self-consciousness’ (quoted in Schaffer 2007: 4). Detective fiction of this period explores this terrain; as Joseph Kestner explains in The Edwardian Detective, this literature ‘deals with disturbance and destabilization as much as crime per se’ (1999: 7). Shifting gender roles, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, anarchism, questions of labour in a globalising capitalist system, imperial expansion and wars, and

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scientific developments and pseudo-scientific ideas about race and degeneration all contributed to the ‘swirl and wreckage’ of Victorian society as it plunged into the twentieth century. While the police attempted to manage the anxiety, the public was anxious about the police too: Fenian bomb threats and unsolved murders, most famously the Jack the Ripper murders, did little to shore up public confidence in the authorities (see Ousby 1976: 129–32). Potentially dangerous freedom vied with potentially repressive surveillance for the soul of fin-de-siècle society, topics that made fertile soil for the detective story. While there have arguably been mystery stories since Oedipus and detective stories for most of the nineteenth century, there is an explosion of detective fiction in its final decades. A partial list includes: J. E. Preston Muddock’s four Dick Donovan stories in The Strand in 1892; Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt series, which began with ‘The Lenton Croft Robberies’ in the March 1894 issue of The Strand; L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s locked room mysteries; Victor Whitechurch, the pioneer of the railway detective stories; Baroness Emma Orczy, whose Lady Molly of Scotland Yard stories feature an early female sleuth; Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados; R. Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke mysteries; G. K. Chesterton’s priest sleuth Father Brown; and Inspector Hanaud of A. E. W. Mason’s At the Villa Rosa (1910). Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, played with the form by spotlighting the criminal, Raffles, rather than the detective. By 1913 the detective story ‘was sufficiently established for E. C. Bentley to publish an enjoyable spoof of the genre, Trent’s Last Case’ (Keating 1989: 364). Seven years later the first Agatha Christie mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, appeared and the Golden Age, including the work not only of Christie, but of others such as Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Freeman Wills Crofts, was under way.1 In addition to cultural developments that fuelled the rise of, and interest in, the detective, innovations in publishing greatly shaped the genre. Doyle famously claimed that he was the first to see the market potential of distinct stories connected by a serial character: Clearly the ideal compromise was a character which carried through and yet instalments which were each complete in themselves, so that the purchaser was always sure that he could relish the whole contents of the magazine. I believe that I was the first to realise this and The Strand Magazine the first to put it into practice. (Doyle 2012: 95–6) Mike Ashley lists The Strand’s competitors: The obvious success of The Strand led to many imitations, making the 1890s the age of the popular-fiction magazine, including the major rivals The Windsor, Pearson’s Magazine, Harmsworth’s Monthly (later The London Magazine) and The Royal, while other magazines such as English Illustrated, The Ludgate, Pall Mall and Cassell’s Family Magazine adapted to follow the Strand format. (Ashley 2016: 55) In addition to the profusion of literal detective stories, there is also an abundance of detective figures in fin-de-siècle literature of other genres, whether it is vampire hunter Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) or the lawyer, Gabriel Utterson, who

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is trying to solve the mystery of his altered friend in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Some critics see the rise of the detective as a type of literary hero as an essentially conservative phenomenon. According to Michael Sims, ‘psychologists describe detective stories, especially the early ones, as cathartic and often conservative’ because ‘an initial threat to the social order [is] combated and vanquished by the investigator’ (2011: xiv). Indeed, this has been a dominant, if by no means entire, trend in the critical understanding of Sherlock Holmes. Critics such as Rosemary Jann (1995), Christopher Clausen (1984), Catherine Belsey (1994) and Franco Moretti (2000; 1988) have argued from a variety of theoretical perspectives that while Doyle does represent a newly globalised London threatening to come apart at the seams, he makes Holmes available to sew them up in about twenty pages or less. Belsey argues that ‘the project of the Sherlock Holmes stories is to dispel magic and mystery, to make everything explicit [and] accountable’ (1995: 383). Even critics who argue for a more nuanced understanding of the ideological work of the detective see these stories as attempts to resolve anxiety. Thus Christopher Pittard argues that late Victorian detective fiction ‘dramatizes an anxiety about material contamination and impurity’ and sees ‘detection’ as an ‘act of cleaning’ (2011: 13). Some critics, however, argue for a different reading. Ed Wiltse sees Holmes ‘on many of the boundaries of bourgeois normality he has been assumed to patrol’ (1998: 107). Nicholas Daly explains that ‘while we cannot ignore the existence of a fin-de-siècle discourse of crisis and anxiety, neither can we take it at face value’; it is time, Daly writes, for ‘a reconsideration of the fin de siècle as a period of crisis’ (1999: 33, 30). Daly instead reads the detective story as part of the rise of romance in relation to an ‘ethos of professionalism and expertise’ (8). The nineteenth century was a time of increasing specialisation, with the detective as a kind of expert. Holmes, who practises ‘the science of deduction’, famously manifests expertise in particular areas (140 different kinds of tobacco ash) while having almost no idea about entire disciplines (‘Knowledge of Philosophy – Nil’).2 The detective’s skills range from forensic and medical science to legal expertise and psychological insight. He or she is allied with other figures of this era, such as the explorer of both imperial spaces and urban wilds (discussed in this volume by Gerald Monsman; see also Thomas (1999), Frank (2003) and McLaughlin (2000)). There is a kind of detective work in the travel writing of Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley as well as the urban investigations of Charles Booth and W. T. Stead.3 The detective embodies the specialism of his or her age; as Keating writes, ‘of all the romantic specialists of the age – whether scientist, sociologist, psychic doctor, journalist, space traveler, alienist, imperial explorer, spy, modernist, town-planner or psychoanalyst – none offered so specialized, and yet so comprehensive, a service as the private detective’ (1989: 363). The detective walks this line between specialisation and putting that knowledge to use in a broader context. Holmes practises detection for its own sake; he doesn’t always require a resolution in the actual criminal justice system.4 Sometimes the detective investigates problems that are too large for resolution. In the story written just before his ‘death’ at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes tells Watson that he is interested in ‘the problems furnished by nature rather than those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society is responsible’ (Doyle 2012: I.567). Julian Wolfreys, in his introduction to the fin-de-siècle detective novel The Beetle, suggests that ‘the detective

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admits to the boundaries . . . of the knowable’ (2004: 31). One of the areas that the fin-de-siècle detective patrols is the very borders of knowledge itself. The detective is called into being in the context of anxiety and the production of knowledge that seeks to understand and control the consequences of a rapidly changing world. Critics who see the detective as essentially conservative note that in these stories social chaos is embodied in an individual actor and the detective identifies and apprehends the bad actor, as Sherlock Holmes does with Moriarty. The detective, however, is less the sure-footed imperial rubbish collector than we might expect; Moriarty is involved in a small number of actual stories. The fin-de-siècle detective story tells us more about the structural violence shaping the world than it does about its resolution. This chapter will look at three works that illustrate the often unsettling nature of fin-de-siècle detective fiction: Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Grant Allen’s Hilda Wade series (1899–1900), and Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear (1914–15). These works represent the bestselling, serialised aspect of the genre, as well as the generic indeterminacy that is a feature of the detective story from its very beginning until a formalist crackdown, exemplified by Ronald Knox’s ten commandments, creates a splintering into various twentieth-century genres: Golden Age, thriller, spy, hardboiled.5 These three stories contain elements of all of these genres as they think through England’s relationship to its empire and represent the detective making sense of this wider world.

The Beetle The Beetle, one of the stranger stories in a decade full of them, is a primer on late Victorian figures and concerns. Wolfreys writes that ‘Marsh’s novel belongs to, and is very much a manifestation of, fin de siècle urban anxiety’ (2004: 323). Daly sees The Beetle as being equally a story of the collaborative professional work called forth in the efforts to fight that anxiety. Regardless, the challenge of solving both earthly and unearthly mysteries requires a detective and Marsh provides one in the figure of Augustus Champnell. The Beetle was published in volume form in 1897, the same year as Dracula, and sold more copies than Stoker’s vampire story.6 Richard Marsh started out his life as Bernard Heldmann, who in turn started out as an author writing popular stories in magazines such as The Union Jack. A taste for the good life and a penchant for bad cheques landed him in jail for eighteen months in 1883–4. When he was released, he changed his name but not his profession: writer of popular stories. He wrote as many as four novels a year and multiple short-story collections before his death in 1915, but nothing proved as famous as The Beetle. The Beetle tells the story of a small cast of characters whose lives, romances and careers are (at least temporarily) turned upside down by the mysterious appearance of a foreign other. The foreigner, possibly both male and female, human and non-human (with the ability to turn into a beetle), has come to London to terrify the rising political star Paul Lessingham. First serialised as ‘The Peril of Paul Lessingham: The Story of a Haunted Man’ in the periodical Answers from 13 March to 19 June 1897, it was published as The Beetle a few months later. When Lessingham was a young man, he’d been to Egypt, where he found himself drawn to a musical establishment that doubled as a meeting place for a cult of Isis. Men would be held in a kind of trance, made to be sex slaves to the ‘Woman of the Songs’, and to witness the human sacrifice of white

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English women. Lessingham finally summons enough strength to break free and makes it back to England to become a member of parliament and the betrothed of Marjorie Lindon, a quasi-new woman and the daughter of a conservative MP. Lessingham starts acting erratically, and a drifter falls under the spell of the foreign other and breaks into Lessingham’s house. Lindon involves her childhood friend, now an inventor, Sydney Atherton. When Lindon goes missing, Lessingham and Atherton seek out the help of confidential agent Augustus Champnell.7 The story is told in four parts by four different narrators, echoing the many narrators of The Moonstone, but concludes with the narrative of Champnell, who follows the story to its fiery conclusion in a train accident, an explosion in Egypt, and the happy marriages and resumption of careers of the recovering main characters. The Beetle ‘“gives face” to everything that is unstable in late imperial culture’ (Wolfreys 2004: 19). It also elicits, in response to that instability, a range of different kinds of knowledge that help understand it: science, police work, parliamentary study, myth and travel writing. Criminal investigation might be inadequate to the mysteries of the supernatural, such as in the case of the ‘foreign intruder’ whose ‘supernatural, easily metamorphized body’, according to Kelly Hurley, ‘is not subject to the usual limitations of time and space’ (1996: 126). However, detective work in The Beetle emerges as the most powerful way to work out as much of the story as is possible. The detective hero, Champnell, plays the conventional role of collecting information and sorting it out: ‘if there is a man who can be backed to find a needle in any amount of haystacks it is the great Augustus’ (Marsh 2004: 258). As Champnell comments, when trying to hear a voice above the noise, ‘I had to make sense of the whole’ (314). Champnell is only one part of the story, but his part includes Lessingham’s Egypt narrative as well as the resolution of the tale. Champnell’s story includes the practical legwork characteristic of the genre: interviews with witnesses, train timetables and cross-London chases. The foreign other, when on the move with the mesmerised Lindon, is tracked because of a large bundle it carries on its head. Clues are traded between various officials across telegraph wires and public transportation. Facing mysterious threats, the rational Champnell explains: ‘I am never appalled by singularity. It is my normal atmosphere’ (236). But while a team of a politician (Lessingham), a scientist (Atherton) and a detective (Champnell) use their knowledge and resources to solve as much of the mystery as possible, it never explains away the terror that underwrites the novel. Lessingham hires Champnell to ‘protect me from the terrorism which threatens once more to overwhelm my mental and my physical powers’ (Marsh 2004: 251). During the chase for Lindon, Lessingham, Atherton and Champnell wonder about Marjorie being ‘alone with that diabolical Asiatic, with the enormous bundle, which was but the lurking place of nameless terrors’ (293). Witnesses report hearing ‘yelling and shrieking’ (308). The foreign other assaults multiple characters in the novel, including Lessingham and Lindon, but the exact nature of that assault is left unspecified, to play on the deepest fears of the reader. Part of what lurks unnamed in this story is English involvement in Egypt, the reason for Lessingham and the other English people to be there in the first place, and the haunting price of imperial involvement.8 With its team of experts, The Beetle documents the power of modernity to know and shrink the world. Champnell not only uses detective legwork but pieces together ethnographic narratives of ancient Egypt as well as unsolved crimes of English citizens

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abroad to construct what he knows about the nefarious purposes of the foreign other. Atherton, an inventor who functions as Champnell’s sidekick, is, like Watson, a man of science. But this story also reveals the dangers of modernity and the limits of knowledge. As the trains speed Champnell along on his investigations, a violent train wreck concludes the novel, and Marsh describes the wreckage using the same language that describes the effect of the ancient cult of Isis, with ‘piteous cries’ of ‘half-frenzied creatures’ (Marsh 2004: 318). Champnell finds Marjorie alive and evidence of the foreign other’s combustion, but he is not certain: What became of the creature who all but did her to death; who he was – if it was a ‘he’, which is extremely doubtful; whence he came; whither he went; what was the purport of his presence here, – to this hour these things are puzzles. (320) Champnell is both a specialist, honing his own craft (he knows when to stay silent during an interview with a chatty but temperamental neighbour, how to work the railway timetable to apprehend the fugitives), and also someone whose mission exceeds his professional bounds. He confesses that his ‘interest in the quest was already far other than a merely professional one. . . . One is not always, even in strictly professional matters, influenced by strictly professional instincts’ (298–9). But the ‘Mystery of the Beetle’, as he admits at the end of the novel, also exceeds the bounds of his professional knowledge. Before Champnell takes over the story, Marjorie Lindon narrates a section. She, too, has some detective qualities and she takes an active and independent role in the investigation (though this admittedly leads to her capture and subsequent assault). There were several female detectives appearing during the final decades of the nineteenth century, before women had an actual role in police work. The first jobs in policing for women were in 1883, when Scotland Yard needed women for female searches. The first women hired as officers joined in 1918. But the first female detective in fiction appeared almost half a century before, in Andrew Forrester’s (the pen name for James Redding Ware) detective Mrs G in The Female Detective (1864). Catherine Louisa Pirkis wrote seven detective stories, published in the Ludgate Magazine, and eventually collected in the volume The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective in 1894. Fergus Hume has a gypsy girl sleuth, Hagar, and George R. Sims’s female detective was Dorcas Dene, appearing in the same year as The Beetle. The rise of the female detective embodies the anxiety about changing gender roles as well as a response to it. Issues of safety, freedom and self-sufficiency are evident in these characters’ hobbies (riding bicycles and knowing jujitsu), and the tone of them alternates between light-hearted and rather violent (see Godfrey 2012). Richard Marsh wrote a series himself: Judith Lee was the hero of stories in The Strand that ran from August 1911 to August 1912. Judith rather accidentally becomes an amateur detective because she can read lips. As she explains, ‘In my case the gift, or knack, or whatever it is, is hereditary. My father was a teacher of the deaf and dumb – a very successful one. His father was, I believe, one of the originators of the oral system’ (Marsh 2016: 1). Throughout the series, though, her expertise in lip-reading is all-important. Some of the first female detective stories are relatively cosy and good natured, such as Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke or Grant Allen’s ‘Miss Cayley’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, coming from Marsh, the Judith Lee stories are dark. The story ‘The Man Who Cut Off My Hair’

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tells how the young Judith reads the lips of two strangers and realises they are hatching a plot to rob her neighbour. When she is noticed spying on them through a window, she is bound, is threatened with murder, has her hair cut off, and is then hit with her hair as well as threatened with having it shoved down her throat. This scene explains the anger that serves as her motivation for solving crimes.9 Unlike other female sleuths, she remains unmarried, and narrates her own stories, which prevents a Watsonesque mediation of her odd independence. One story, ‘Eavesdropping at Interlaken’, chillingly depicts a serial killer. The Judith Lee stories are more sinister than those of the main female detective considered here, Hilda Wade, but both reveal the undercurrent of danger which the detective’s knowledge can only partially mitigate.

Hilda Wade Grant Allen would have a safe place in the history of the detective figure even if he’d never invented Hilda Wade. He wrote the first detective story to be published in The Strand, ‘Jerry Stokes’, in only the third issue in March 1891 (Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes short story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, would appear a few months later in July, although his first contribution for The Strand, ‘The Voice of Science’, ran in the same March instalment as ‘Jerry Stokes’). Allen’s An African Millionaire ran serially over twelve episodes in The Strand from 1896 to 1897, featuring a compelling criminal, the con artist Colonel Clay, and his African millionaire victim Sir Charles Vandrift.10 He also wrote ‘The Grand Ruby Robbery’ (1892) and Miss Cayley’s Adventures (serialised in The Strand from 1898 to 1899 and featuring another female sleuth) before turning to his nurse detective, Hilda Wade. Allen and Doyle were neighbors in real life as well as on the pages of The Strand. When Allen died before the final instalment of the Hilda Wade series, Doyle wrote the conclusion on the basis of their personal conversations. Though a woman of some means, Hilda Wade works as a nurse and comes to St Nathaniel’s hospital in order to be near a famous doctor, Sebastian, whom she watches like a ‘lynx-eyed detective’ (Allen 2008: 10), and where she meets her future fiancé, Dr Hubert Cumberledge, a disciple of Sebastian. It is apparent that she has a mysterious motive, and it is gradually revealed that Sebastian was involved in the death of her father, Dr Yorke-Bannerman. Hilda will not marry, much to Cumberledge’s dismay, until she clears her father’s name. Hilda Wade is at the cross-section of many roads patrolled by the fin-de-siècle detective: science, imperial exploration and gender roles. Like The Beetle, the twelve stories together read like a sampler of the emerging genre, which is to say a collection of various genres: medical science, imperial travel, spiritualism, a Golden Age shipboard comedy of errors, and a shipwreck story concluded by a juridical confession. The stories think out loud about feminine and masculine ways of knowing. Sebastian is characterised as one whose ‘stern, sharp face was above all things the face of a man absorbed and engrossed by one overpowering pursuit in life – the sacred thirst of knowledge, which swallowed up his entire nature’; Hilda as possessing ‘the other side of the same endowment’, ‘the deepest feminine gift – intuition’ (Allen 2008: 8). She is a kind of hybrid, similar to the description of Irene Adler of ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, who has the ‘face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men’ (Doyle 2003: I.193). Allen raises but ultimately dispels anxiety over gender lines

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blurred by the new woman. ‘Nurse Wade’, Allen writes, ‘stands intermediate mentally between the two sexes. She recognizes TEMPERAMENT – the fixed form of character, and what it is likely to do – in a degree which I have never seen equaled elsewhere’ (2008: 9). Hilda challenges any essentialist notion of female intuition by giving most of the credit to her memory, which she inherited from her father (49). She has a photographic memory and reads the local papers, remembering family names, occupations, births and deaths. ‘I have hundreds – oh, thousands – of such facts stored and pigeonholed in my memory’, she tells Cumberledge (48). This knowledge is not opposed to her instinct but shapes it. When Cumberledge accuses her of ‘second sight’ she says ‘no, not second sight; nothing uncanny, nothing supernatural. But prevision, yes; prevision based not on omens or auguries, but on solid fact – on what I have seen and noticed’ (53). Here she anticipates Christie’s Miss Marple, whose skills are less about her feminine intuition than about how observation and memory allow an accumulation of stories from which she deduces patterns that she can apply to human behaviour. This is an important innovation in the detective: as a figure embodying knowledge but also as a warning about celebrating knowledge over feeling. Sebastian ‘has a gigantic intellect, a burning thirst for knowledge, one love, one hobby – science; and no moral instincts’ (119). Holmes may look like this sometimes, a ‘reasoning machine’, but his relationships to Watson (to say nothing of his feeling for Irene Adler), his brother Mycroft, Mrs Hudson and the various Scotland Yard detectives who increasingly populate the stories, tether him to the social world. Hilda Wade also illustrates the fin-de-siècle detective story’s engagement with England’s empire. Before becoming a doctor at St Nathaniel’s, Sebastian had ‘three years of travel in Africa’. This becomes relevant when Hilda’s identity as YorkeBannerman’s daughter is exposed and she, fearing for her life, flees to South Africa and then Rhodesia, ‘the only woman of means who had ever gone up of her own free will to Rhodesia’ (Allen 2008: 115). Cumberledge follows Hilda, spotting her riding in full new woman fashion on a bicycle. They decide to wait together for Sebastian to show his hand. Cumberledge becomes a farmer, Hilda a nurse and teacher to the local Boers. What happens next is classic Victorian detective fiction. Recalling the bloody imperial battle that kicks off Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), and that embedded in The Sign of Four (1890), Allen gives the reader a Matabele uprising, here allegedly orchestrated by Sebastian to kill off Hilda and prevent the exposure of his past crime. One day Cumberledge comes home to find his host family, children included, slaughtered; Hilda has cleverly camouflaged herself by a rock, ensuring her survival and that of the family’s infant. She and Cumberledge flee, alternating bicycle and horseback, new woman and old masculine adventure story working in concert, getting back to Salisbury, where the white community and allied Africans fight off the natives roused up by Sebastian. With the next instalment, the pursuit of Sebastian leads Hilda and Cumberledge on board a ship bound for India. Suddenly it becomes a Golden Age mystery, with the pair joining the travels of Lady Meadowcroft, and Allen engaging in a comedy of manners and light judgement on the confines of women’s roles and the English class system. Together with the Meadowcroft entourage, Hilda and Cumberledge find adventure in Tibet. A girl of the period, Hilda is ‘seized with a craze for Buddhism’ (Allen 2008: 178). The latter becomes handy as knowledge rather than hobby

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as Hilda and Cumberledge are taken prisoner in Tibet by a guide paid by Sebastian. They manage to avoid being murdered and hear about Sebastian, who has tracked them here, dying of the plague in a distant village. Cumberledge and Hilda nurse him back only to almost lose him again in shipwreck. They are rescued and Sebastian gives a death-bed confession in the instalment written by Doyle after Allen’s death, fittingly titled ‘The Episode of the Dead Man Who Spoke’. The Hilda Wade stories start sure-footedly in an English hospital with scientists solving a medical mystery and gradually spiral out into the wider world, crossing borders of nation and genre. The borders of the emerging detective figure are equally permeable, as masculine vies with feminine knowledge, scientific with spiritual understanding. While the Hilda Wade series does not have the tone of terror that underwrites The Beetle, it does leave disturbing violence uncontained. The Matabele uprising is presented as both a consequence of British foreign policy and a time for racial solidarity. Cumberledge explains in ‘The Episode of the European with the Kaffir Heart’ that in a conflict of race we MUST back our own colour. I do not know whether the natives were justified in rising or not; most likely, yes; for we had stolen their country; but when once they rose, when the security of white women depended upon repelling them, I felt I had no alternative. . . . I was bound to bear my part in restoring order. (Allen 2008: 140) Restoring order here means restoring a sense of racial and sexual hierarchies, even as the figure of the globetrotting female detective, able to pedal a bicycle away from murderous natives while holding on to an infant, destabilises that worldview. Just as disturbing as the Matabele uprising are two instalments that feature Hilda’s prediction, at a friend’s wedding, that the groom will kill his new wife after two years. In ‘The Episode of the Wife Who Did Her Duty’, Allen nods at contemporary attempts to read the criminal’s body for clues. Hilda tells Cumberledge that the new bride looks exactly like the type of woman whose passive control of her husband will cause him to do violence. ‘They have THIS sort of profile’, Hilda says sketching the wife: ‘Women with faces like that ALWAYS get assaulted’ (Allen 2008: 55). Allen, author of the new woman novel The Woman Who Did (1895), appears to be offering a commentary on the pathology of gender roles: I recollected then how Hilda Wade had pointed out to me during those six months at St. Nathaniel’s that the women whose husbands assaulted them were almost always ‘notable housewives’ . . . good souls who prided themselves not a little on their skill in management. (59) However, the stories see the husband’s murder of his wife as thoroughly defensible. While ultimately side-stepping any official resolution by having the man kill himself, the misogyny is shockingly palpable. Allen’s tone does not guide the reader to any particular understanding of the story’s – or Hilda’s – commentary on domestic violence. The sense that the fin-de-siècle detective cannot restore order to this tangle of pathology lingers long after Hilda and Cumberledge have moved briskly on to another corner of the world in the next instalment.

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The Valley of Fear Sherlock Holmes famously did not become a sensation until the stand-alone stories that would become the Adventures began to appear in The Strand in July 1891. As a result, critics tend to ignore the novels when distilling the essence of Holmes’s detective skills, especially The Valley of Fear, which is seen as evidence of a decline in Doyle’s story-telling abilities. The Valley of Fear, however, has important parallels with his first two Holmes novels, which are themselves clear articulations of the scope and nature of what he believed to be the detective’s power. A Study in Scarlet gives a large portion of its story to crimes in Mormon America, and The Sign of Four contains a crime story in India. Both of these distant crimes come back to haunt characters in England. Readers might enjoy Holmes dashing off in a hansom cab from the steps of Baker Street, but Doyle understood him to be a character who defied boundaries. Holmes famously speaks to Watson of wanting to ‘fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on’ (Doyle 2012: I.225). Holmes fans would also remember that ‘this great city’ had earlier been characterised by Doyle as ‘London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained’ (7). The novels, arguably more than the stories, reveal a central interest in the longterm effects of fear and how individual crimes are connected to social and systemic violence that knows no borders. They show that the conception of the world’s most famous detective was very much embedded in a messy world, one not solvable by a single sleuth or represented by a single genre. The stories, by contrast, with their more singular crimes and, for the most part, speedy resolution, more readily lend themselves to the reading of detective fiction as conservative restoration of order and dispelling of mystery. The Valley of Fear appeared at a time of exceptional fear in England; the first instalment ran in The Strand in September 1914, a month after England entered the First World War. The story itself time-travels back before Holmes’s and Moriarty’s ‘deaths’ in 1893. This enables Doyle to keep an explicit war-setting out of the picture, although there is certainly an atmosphere of unpredictable violence and fear in the story and in the surrounding pages of The Strand. The Valley of Fear takes place both in England, at a country estate where there has been a gruesome murder, and, years earlier, in the mining area of Pennsylvania, which is terrorised by local gangs battling for control against the state and the corporations that work in shadowy concert with it. The particular gang of Irish American coal and iron workers that rule the Vermissa Valley is called The Scowrers, which sounds a lot like the ‘Skirmishers’, an actual sister group of the Clan-na-Gael, an Irish resistance movement which had been threatening to bomb English and Scottish cities in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The Scowrers are also loosely based on the Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society, and their downfall in The Valley of Fear shares some aspects of their real-life take-down by a Pinkerton agent named James McParland. Doyle was not only aware of terrorist threats at home and abroad, but had met the head of the Pinkerton agency on an ocean voyage and became engaged by this particular story. While he clumsily makes Moriarty the final link in the Scowrers chain, this story is less about whodunit than about living in an age of terrorism, its reach, its efficacy as

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a strategy for resistance, and the compromised and often corrupting position crimefighters inhabit when fighting this kind of threat. The fin-de-siècle detective’s beat is far from clear. The Valley of Fear begins when Sherlock Holmes receives a cryptic letter from a member of Moriarty’s criminal gang, who is suffering an outbreak of conscience. As Holmes performs his legendary feats of deduction before a somewhat confused Watson – mapping out via ciphers that something bad is going to happen to a ‘Douglas’ or a ‘Birlstone’ – a Scotland Yard inspector walks in to announce that ‘Mr. Douglas of Birlstone Manor House was horribly murdered last night!’ (Doyle 2012: II.239). Before the end of two chapters, Holmes sees a ‘chain’ connecting this ‘dead man in Sussex’ and ‘a great brain in London’ (245): Moriarty. We seem poised for nostalgia when Holmes arrives in the village of Birlstone – a ‘very ancient cluster of half-timbered cottages’ whose previous owners had restored a drawbridge that had fallen into disrepair. ‘By thus renewing the custom of the old feudal days’, Watson explains, ‘the Manor House was converted into an island during the night – a fact which had a very direct bearing upon the mystery which was soon to engage the attention of all England’ (247). Holmes is called upon to work out how the murderer got in and out of the house, since the drawbridge was raised. The message is clear: despite wistful sentiments about its past, England is not an island any more – it and its empire are part of a world where no one is safe, no one is untouchable. But Doyle also makes clear that Birlstone Manor and the Old England it represents were never safe. In the house, Holmes detects a secret nook where Charles I was concealed during the English Civil War (prior to being beheaded). When the other policeman suggests that this record of English crime that Holmes, a connoisseur, provides is ‘no business of ours’, Holmes responds ‘Is it not? Is it not? Breadth of view . . . is one of the essentials of our profession. The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interest’ (280). The money to restore this Old England also comes from outside: Douglas of Birlstone Manor made his money in ‘the California gold fields’ (247), much as Baskerville Hall was restored by both South African and Canadian wealth. Early clues as to the murder indicate some sort of secret society: a card reading ‘V. V. 341’ is left on the corpse, whose head is blown off by an American shotgun and who cannot be properly identified. The nearly headless body also sports a symbol branded on the arm. The wife reports that her husband had been anxious for the five years they’d been married. Douglas told his wife, when she inquired, that ‘I have been in the Valley of Fear. I am not out of it yet’ (Doyle 2012: II.267). Holmes’s detective work reveals several chapters later that, in fact, Douglas is alive (having conveniently hidden himself with the help of the wife and a friend in the Charles I secret passage) and the dead body is actually that of an assassin from the secret society who’d been sent to exact revenge on Douglas. This is the first taste of one of the morals of this story: you can’t tell the good from the bad – literally, when heads are blown off, but also one understands that, as the mystery is revealed, today’s good guys were often yesterday’s bad guys. Douglas also bears the brand of a murderous secret society. This is because he is really Birdy Edwards, a Pinkerton detective who, undercover as Jack McMurdo, an Irish American Chicago-area forger, infiltrated the Scowrers of Vermissa Valley, ultimately getting some arrested and hanged, and leaving others angry enough to follow him around for the rest of his life, attempting to kill him.

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A local newspaperman in the Vermissa Valley gets savagely beaten for running the following story about terrorism in the coal and iron district: Twelve years have now elapsed since the first assassinations which proved the existence of a criminal organization in our midst . . . that a state of terrorism and lawlessness should be established under the very shadow of the sacred folds of the starry Flag of Freedom which would raise horror in our minds if we read of it as existing under the most effete monarchy of the East. (Doyle 2012: II.319) Oppositions between East and West, civilised and savage, are both deployed and undone by the violence of the Scrowrers, but also by the state, as corporations wield increasing power over the mining labourers. Terror is not easily assigned to one actor or another, but pervades the Vermissa Valley like bad weather. McMurdo is told upon his arrival that the cloud of murder hangs thicker and lower than that over the heads of the people. It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death. The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn. (325) The problem with this kind of sprawling web of crime is that it ensnares the innocent, marring the lives of individuals who cannot find a clear place to stand. One lodge member tells McMurdo: ‘I was forced to join the local lodge, same as you did last night. . . . I found that I was under the orders of a black villain and caught in a meshwork of crime. What could I do?’ (324). The head of the gang is Boss McGinty and he is evil. But besides those secret powers which it was universally believed that he exercised in so pitiless a fashion, he was a high public official, a municipal councilor, and a commissioner of roads, elected to the office through the votes of the ruffians who in turn expected to receive favours at his hands . . . the decent citizen was terrorized into paying public blackmail, and holding his tongue lest some worse thing befall him’ (Doyle 2012: II.305) Doyle makes multiple points in this sentence. McGinty is a murderer, a terrorist, a blackmailer, but also a legitimate (indeed elected) member of that society. In order to infiltrate the ranks of the Scowrers, Douglas/Birdy/McMurdo must be a vigorous and convincing participant in their violent reign. He succeeds. After the trials, he moves to California, becomes rich and then moves to England, where he marries, settles at Birlstone manner and, five years later, blows the head off a Scowrer seeking payback. But the shadow of the Valley of Fear is long, and after Holmes wraps up this mystery, we learn that Douglas is knocked overboard while at sea with his wife. Significantly, given how much Sherlock Holmes stories are supposed to represent the opposite, crime in this story is not simplified by the expertise of the detective but, like McGinty’s organisation rendered ‘wider and more complex’ (Doyle 2012: II.332). Legitimate labour issues in Pennsylvania make it hard to tell the good from the bad. Bad individuals are to be feared (such as McGinty), but even the Pinkerton detective must commit crimes as part of his infiltration. Beyond that, Birdy is a private detective,

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working to represent not the ideally independent interests of the state justice system, but those of a private client, an industrialist with an obvious personal vested interest. If Birdy is based on McParland, his client is Franklin B. Gowen, the president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, one of the wealthiest mine owners in the world. Birdy represents an alliance of law enforcement and big business against labour interests, not just against any terroristic violence they might employ. Doyle, while obviously despising the brazen reign of terror of the Scowrers, does not shy away from the murky moral landscape of the Vermissa Valley. When McMurdo is asked ‘was that crime – or what else would you call it?’, he responds: ‘There are some would say it was war. . . . A war of two classes with all in, so that each struck as best it could’ (324). To his lover, someone with whom he doesn’t have to play a role, he explains: ‘We are but poor men that are trying in our own way to get our rights’ (331). When she says ‘there is no honour in such a manner’, he replies: ‘it’s just how you look at it’ (332). It would be a stretch to call Doyle a nihilist or even a relativist, but he is far from being the pied piper of law-and-order certainty. The Valley of Fear does not conclude with a certain triumph over evil. Not only is Douglas knocked overboard, avoiding official justice, but Moriarty, the architect, is still at large. ‘I don’t say that he can’t be beat’, says Holmes. ‘But you must give me time – you must give me time!’ Watson concludes the novel: ‘We all sat in silence for some minutes while those fateful eyes still strained to pierce the veil’ (Doyle 2012: II.354). Readers know Moriarty is dead as The Valley of Fear is published twenty-one years after the evil professor fell to his death at Reichenbach. So partly this is an inside joke. But on the pages of The Strand, Moriarty appears to have come back from the dead, just as Sherlock Holmes did thirteen years earlier in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The idea of an evil that can defy the laws of nature is one that is taken up elsewhere in the stories, and in the many Sherlock Holmes adaptations. It also echoes the concluding words of Beetle-hunter Augustus Champnell, that ‘there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, and I am quite prepared to believe that the so-called Beetle . . . was . . . a creature born neither or God nor man’ (322). The Victorian constable who represents the nineteenth century in Woolf’s historical pageant proclaims: Fog or fine weather, I does my duty. At Piccadilly Circus; at ’Yde Park Corner, directing the traffic of ’Er Majesty’s Empire. The Shah of Persia; Sultan of Morocco; or it may be ’Er Majesty in person; or Cook’s tourists; black men; white men; sailors, soldiers; crossing the ocean; to proclaim her Empire; all of ’em Obey the Rule of my truncheon. But my job don’t end there. I take under my protection and direction the purity and security of all Her Majesty’s minions; in all parts of her dominions; insist that they obey the laws of God and Man. (Woolf 1970: 161–2) The fin-de-siècle detective story, in attempting to grasp the rapidly changing borders of knowledge and nation, blurs the borders of genre. The Victorian constable might ‘insist’ that ‘all parts of her dominions . . . obey the laws of God and Man’. However, the fin-de-siècle detective, part scientist, part spiritualist, sometimes male, sometimes female, understands that the mystery he or she solves can sometimes be outside the laws of God and Man.

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Notes 1. For a comprehensive look at nineteenth-century crime fiction, see Knight (2010). 2. Conan Doyle mentions the tobacco ash in ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ and the areas of Holmes’s ignorance are covered in chapter 3 of A Study in Scarlet. 3. Booth’s Life and Labour of the People is one of the founding texts of British sociology, and W. T. Stead’s The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon is a pioneering work of investigative journalism; see also Reitz (2012). 4. While Holmes doesn’t always turn the criminal in, the most famous of such cases is ‘The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton’. 5. Mystery writer Ronald Knox famously listed ‘ten commandments’ for detective writers to follow, including: ‘All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course’ and ‘No Chinaman must figure in the story.’ See also the final chapter of Reitz (2004), ‘Separated at Birth: Doyle, Kipling and the Partition of English Detective Fiction’. 6. Stoker’s novel was supposed to contain a detective, as Daly (1999: 39) explains: ‘It is interesting to note that among the characters originally planned for the book were “a detective – Cotford”.’ 7. Champnell recurs as a character in a story collection called The Aristocratic Detective (1900). 8. Wolfreys’s ‘Introduction’ to his edited volume of The Beetle (2004) discusses the background of English involvement in Egypt and notes how various military engagement sites figure as locations in the novel. 9. Godfrey (2012) makes a parallel between Judith Lee’s trauma and resulting anger to that of contemporary female sleuth Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. 10. See Christopher Pittard’s (2011) excellent reading of Grant Allen in the context of determinist criminology; especially ch. 3.

Works Cited Allen, G. ([1911–12] 2008), Hilda Wade: A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose, [no place]: Book Jungle. Ashley, M. (2016), Adventures in the Strand: Arthur Conan Doyle and The Strand Magazine, London: British Library. Belsey, C. (1994), ‘Deconstructing the Text: Sherlock Holmes’, in J. A. Hodgson (ed.), Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays, New York: Bedford and St Martin’s, pp. 381–8. Clausen, C. (1984), ‘Sherlock Holmes, Order, and the Late-Victorian Mind’, Georgia Review, 38. 1: 104–23. Daly, N. (1999), Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siecle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914, New York: Cambridge University Press. Doyle, A. C. (2012), Memories and Adventures, New York: Cambridge University Press. Doyle, A. C. (2003), The Complete Sherlock Holmes, vols 1 and 2, ed. K. Freeman, New York: Barnes and Noble. Frank, L. (2003), Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Godfrey, E. (2012), Femininity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature and Society: From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hurley, K. (1996), The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siecle, New York: Cambridge University Press. Jann, R. (1995), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order, New York: Twayne.

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Keating, P. (1989), The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914, London: Secker and Warburg. Kestner, J. (1999), The Edwardian Detective, 1901–1915, Burlington: Ashgate. Knight, S. (2010), Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Marsh, R. ([1911–12] 2016), The Complete Judith Lee Adventures, ed. M. Vuohelainen, Richmond: Vallancourt Books. Marsh, R. ([1897] 2004), The Beetle, ed. J. Wolfreys, New York: Broadview. McLaughlin, J. (2000), Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Moretti, F. (2000), ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, MLQ, 61. 1: 207–21. Moretti, F. (1988), ‘Clues’, in F. Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, New York: Verso, pp. 130–56. Orwell, G. (1956), ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, in G. Orwell, A Collection of Essays, New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, pp. 132–47. Ousby, I. (1976), Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pittard, C. (2011), Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, Burlington: Ashgate. Reitz, C. (2012), ‘How I Found England: The Detective Narratives of Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley’, Nineteenth Century Studies, 26: 101–14. Reitz, C. (2004), Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Schaffer, T. (2007), Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siecle, New York: Longman. Sims, M. (2011), ‘Introduction’, in M. Sims (ed.), The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, New York: Penguin, pp. ix–xxiii. Thomas, R. (1999), Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, New York: Cambridge University Press. Wiltse, E. (1998), ‘“So constant an expectation”: Sherlock Holmes and Seriality’, Narrative, 6. 2: 105–22. Wolfreys, J. (2004), ‘Introduction’, in R. Marsh, The Beetle, ed. J. Wolfreys, New York: Broadview, pp. 9–34. Woolf, V. ([1941] 1970), Between the Acts, New York: Harcourt. Young. G. M. (1969), Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, New York: Oxford University Press.

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List of Contributors

Jad Adams is a Research Fellow of the Institute of English, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His books include: Madder Music Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson (2000), Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle (2004), Kipling (2006) and Women and the Vote: A World History (2014). He has written widely on 1890s characters including Ménie Muriel Dowie, Olive Custance, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Hubert Crackanthorpe and Leila Macdonald, Gabriela and Robert Cunninghame Graham, and Ethel Colburn Mayne. His current project is a book titled Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives. Miriam Elizabeth Burstein is Professor of English at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. She is author of Narrating Women’s History in Britain, 1770–1902 (2004) and Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900 (2013), and editor of Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (2013). She is currently working on a history of the nineteenth-century religious novel in Britain. Alison Chapman is Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada, where she specialises in nineteenth-century literature and culture, digital humanities and women’s writing. Her publications include Networking the Nation: British and American Women’s Poetry and Italy, 1840–1870 (2015), and she is the editor of the ongoing Database of Victorian Periodical Poetry (http://web.uvic.ca/~vicpoet). Emily Coit is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. Her work has appeared in ELH, The Henry James Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature and several edited collections. Her current book project, a literary history of American elitism in the long fin de siècle, examines anti-democratic thought amongst expatriate novelists. Richa Dwor is a faculty member of the English Department at Douglas College, Canada. She is the author of Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing (2015) and of articles on Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy, as well as entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on Judith and Charlotte Montefiore. She is the editor of a forthcoming Routledge anthology, Religious Feeling.

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Alexis Easley is Professor of English at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota. She is the author of two monographs: First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media (2004) and Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship (2011). Her work has appeared in several recent book collections, including the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing, The Blackwell Companion to the Brontës and Harriet Martineau and the Birth of the Disciplines. She co-edited the 2016 Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers (with Andrew King and John Morton) and is currently working on two additional essay collections: Researching the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Case Studies (with Andrew King and John Morton) and The Edinburgh History of Women’s Periodical Culture in Britain. Vol. 2: The Victorian Period (with Clare Gill and Beth Rodgers). She also edits Victorian Periodicals Review. Stefano Evangelista is Fellow and Tutor at Trinity College and Associate Professor in English at the University of Oxford. His research interests are in nineteenth-century English literature (especially aestheticism and secadence), the classical tradition, comparative literature, and the relationship between literary and visual cultures. He is the author of British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (2009) and editor of The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (2010). He is currently working on a monograph on literary cosmopolitanism in the English 1890s. Nick Freeman is Reader in Late-Victorian Literature at Loughborough University. He has published widely on decadence and the gothic, and is the author of two books: Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art 1870–1914 (2007) and 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (2011, paperback 2014). He has also edited Arthur Symons’s Spiritual Adventures for the Modern Humanities Research Association. Josephine M. Guy is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of six monographs and many essays on a variety of topics, including Victorian literature and culture, Oscar Wilde, the history of English as a discipline of knowledge, text-editing and textual theory and, more recently, literature and psycholinguistics. She is the editor of The Victorian Age: An Anthology (1998, 2001) and of an edition of Wilde’s Criticism (2007) as part of the Oxford English Texts (OET) edition of the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Recent main publications include (with Ian Small) The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century Literature (2012) and A Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature (2011); currently she is editing Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and Vera; Or, the Nihilists as part of the OET edition. Catherine Hindson is Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on Victorian and Edwardian performance, work that includes numerous chapters and articles and two monographs: Female Performance Practice on the Fin-de-Siècle Popular Stages of London and Paris: Experiment and Advertisement (2007) and London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity Culture, 1880–1920 (2016). She is currently working on a study of theatre and performance in British industrial villages between the late 1880s and the 1930s.

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Ina Linge is Associate Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. A modern linguist with a focus on gender and sexuality studies, she is currently working on a monograph on German sexological and psychoanalytic life writings and the queer performance of liveability. Her publications include: ‘Gender and Agency between “Sexualwissenschaft” and Autobiography: The Case of N. O. Body’s Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren’ (2015) and the edited volume (with Robert Craig) Biological Discourses: The Language of Science and Literature around 1900 (2017). Sara Lyons is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Kent. Her first book, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt, and Secularisation appeared in 2016. With Michael Collins, she is currently working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Literary Culture, Meritocracy, and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880–1920’. Kirsten MacLeod is a Lecturer in Victorian and Modernist Literature at Newcastle University. She is the author of Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle (2007) and American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation (2017), as well articles on decadence, mainstream and little magazines, and middlebrow writing. Her current research focuses on decadent modernism and modernist cultures of collecting. Anne Markey is President of the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature, and teaches in the Open Education Unit of Dublin City University. Her research focuses on intersections between Gaelic traditions and Irish writing in English, and on the representation of childhood in a variety of texts from the seventeenth century to the present day. She is the author of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts (2011), editor of Patrick Pearse: Short Stories (2009) and Children’s Fiction 1765–1808 (2011), and co-editor of Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess (2010), Irish Tales (2010) and Folklore and Modern Irish Writing (2014). Caroline McCracken-Flesher is Professor in the English Department at the University of Wyoming. Her books include Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (2005) and The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (2012). She has edited volumes on Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish science fiction and the cultural inheritance of the Scottish parliament. Her current projects include a co-edited reconsideration of Walter Scott, a companion to the Scottish nineteenth century and edited volumes of Stevenson and Galt. She is also developing a monograph on Scotland’s discourse of homecoming. Richard Menke is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia and the author of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (2008). He is currently completing a book about media, mass culture and late nineteenth-century literature. Gerald Monsman is Professor of English and former Head of the English Department at the University of Arizona, where he specialises in nineteenth-century British and Anglo-African literature. He has published with the university presses of Hopkins,

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Duke and Yale, and in the area of South African literature has written Olive Schreiner’s Fiction (1991) and H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier (2006), and has edited novels by the Anglo-African authors H. Rider Haggard, Bertram Mitford and Ernest Glanville. His story ‘The Blessed Makers of Peace’ (2017) appeared in the Enkare Review, a Nairobi-based literary magazine. Margaret Ponsonby is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wolverhampton. Her background is in design history and material culture. Her research has focused on the history of domestic interiors and her publications include Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors, 1750–1850 (2007) and Faded and Threadbare Historic Textiles and their Role in Houses Open to the Public (2015). Caroline Reitz is an Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York Graduate Centre. She is the author of Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (2004) as well as articles on Victorian literature and culture in Novel, Genre, Victorian Literature and Culture and 19th Century Studies. A recent article, ‘Nancy Drew, Dragon Tattoo: Female Detective Fiction and the Ethic of Care’, appeared in Textus. She is also a coeditor of Dickens Studies Annual and is currently working on a book about the fiction serialised in Dickens’s journals. Jo Robinson is Associate Professor in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. Her broad research interests in theatre and performance focus on the relationships between performance, place and region from the nineteenth century onwards. She led the AHRC interdisciplinary project ‘Mapping the Moment: Performance Culture in Nottingham 1857–1867’, outputs from which were published in Performance Research and Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film. Recent publications include Theatre & the Rural (2016) and (with Claire Cochrane) Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth (2016). Andrew Smith is Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield. His twenty published books include Gothic Death 1740–1914: A Literary History (2016), The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History (2010), Gothic Literature (2007, revised 2013), Victorian Demons (2004) and Gothic Radicalism (2000). He is editor, with Benjamin Fisher, of the award-winning series ‘Gothic Literary Studies’ and ‘Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions’, published by the University of Wales Press. With William Hughes he edits the series ‘Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic’, and with Anna Barton he edits the series ‘Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’ for Manchester University Press. He is a past president of the International Gothic Association. John Stokes is Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at King’s College London and Honorary Professor of English and Drama at the University of Nottingham. He has written widely on the culture of the fin de siècle; his books include Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations (1996) and the two volumes of Oscar Wilde’s journalism for the Oxford English Texts edition of The Complete Works (2013), co-edited with Mark W. Turner.

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Anna Vaninskaya is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (2010), as well as over forty articles and book chapters on topics ranging from socialism, education, immigration and historical cultures to popular reading and utopian writing. Her current research focuses on Anglo-Russian cultural encounters, in connection with which she is putting together a translated anthology. She is also completing a monograph on the making of modern fantasy.

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Index

Note: ‘n’ denotes chapter notes; italics indicate figures; bold indicates tables. abstract art, 64 Achebe, Chinua, 421, 422n2 Achurch, Janet, 234–6, 241 Act of Union (1800), 196 activism, 151 Adams, Jad, 16, 283–98 Adult, The (magazine), 132, 391 ‘advanced’ women, 321–2, 326, 335, 340 adventure novels see Anglo-African adventure novels advertising, 332–4, 333, 334, 340 aesthetic movement, 27, 219 aestheticism, 2, 26 abstract, 66 and Bournville village, 216 Catholic, 106 English aesthetes in Italy, 269–74 humanitarianism and, 148, 152 illustrated poetry, 46, 49 in Italy, 263–4 magazines, 49, 61–2, 65–6 Scottish writers, 191–2 secularism and, 126, 138 affordable housing, 217 Africa see Anglo-African adventure novels ‘age of transition’, 425 agency and women’s bodies, 370–6 ‘aggressive agnosticism’, 126 agnosticism, 125–6, 142 Aguilar, Grace, The Perez Family, 346 Alastair (Baron Hans Henning Voight), 32 Aleramo, Sibilla, Una donna, 274 Alexander, George, 239–41, 242n5 Alexander II of Russia, 247 Alexander III of Russia, 253, 254 Aliens Act (1905), 244 Alkalay-Gut, Karen, 49 Allen, Grant, detective fiction and Hilda Wade series, 428, 431–3 allotments, 217 allusion, 48 almshouses, Bournville village, 224–5 altruism, 158n2

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America, 25–6, 41–2 ‘American nervousness’, 362–3 Anglo-American cultural relations, 8–9 collectors’ market, 26, 32–3 literary criticism, 37–40, 41, 43n18 ‘make it new’ modernism, 25–7, 31, 34, 40–2, 42n1, 104 mass market publishing, 31–2 Modern Library of the World’s Best Books, 30–1, 35, 39 modernism, decadence within, 27–9 and the new decadence, 33–7 publishing revivals, 29–30 anarchism, 151, 159n13, 247, 250 Ancketill, W. R., Dowdenham: A Tale of High Life in the Present Period, 199 Anders als die Andern (‘Different from the Others’) (film), 394, 395 Anderson, Benedict, 233 Anderson, Mary, 328–9, 329 androgyny, 33 Anglo-African adventure novels, 19, 401–7, 422, 422n1, 422n2, 422n3 Bertram Mitford, Sign of the Spider, 410–11 Ernest Glanville, Fair Colonist, 411–14 H. Rider Haggard, Nada the Lily, 407–9 Henry Merriman, With Edged Tools, 414–17 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 404, 416, 419–21 W. C. Scully, Between Sun and Sand, 417–19 Anglo-African Writers’ Club, London, 401 animal hierarchies, 156 animal rights, 158 animal welfare, 149, 151, 156, 158n4 anonymous publication, periodicals, 323–4, 327 Answers (periodical), 428 anthropology, 95–6, 209 anthropomorphism, 148, 153–4 anti-Catholicism, 106, 107, 110, 119–20 anti-decadence, 2, 8, 25, 40–1, 296 anti-feminism, 324–5, 329, 337, 341n3 anti-representational design, 63, 66 Antoine, André, 202

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446

index

anxiety, 16, 98–9, 101, 230, 312, 425–6, 428, 430 apostasy, 351 Appeal Pocket Series, 32 Applin, Arthur, The Reve, 307 architecture, 113, 114–15 Bournville village, 216, 218–19, 224 Argosy (magazine), 58 aristocracy, 107 Aristotle, 402–3 Arlen, Michael, 34–5, 38 Armstrong, Isobel, 48 Arnold, Matthew, 188, 202 art, 2 abstract, 64 Catholic, 115, 117–21 and humanitarianism, 159n20 impressionism, 76, 78 Irish, 205–6 art criticism, 265–8, 273 art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art), 26, 96, 265–9, 270, 277n3 art nouveau, 219 artificiality, 26 artistic revolt, 26 artistic sensibility, 283–4 arts, the, unification of, 61 Arts and Crafts Movement, 49, 60, 216, 218, 219, 224 Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland, 205–6 Ashley, Mike, 426 Ashton, Janet, 253, 254, 256 Atalanta (magazine), 48, 50–3, 51, 56, 56–9 atheism, 125, 129, 289, 346, 351 Athenaeum (periodical), 244, 251 theatre reviews, 313–14, 315 Atlantic Monthly (magazine), 236 Austen, Jane, 162 autobiography, 29–30 autonomy, 268, 275, 276 Bairner, Alan, 206 banned books, 33, 37 Barnes, Djuna, 33 Barney, Natalie, 294 Barnhisel, Greg, 26 Barrie, J. M. ‘Brought Back from Elysium’, 187 Sentimental Tommy, 183, 187–8 Tommy and Grizel, 183, 190 Bashkirtseff, Marie, 245 bathing, 222, 227n18 Battle of the Moy, or, How Ireland Gained her Independence, The (Anon), 200 Bauer, Heike, 384 Beard, George Miller, American Nervousness, 362–3 Beardsley, Aubrey, 25 Beardsley, Ellen, 285–6 Beardsley, Mabel, 285–6 beauty, 266, 276, 326–7, 327, 338–40, 375–6 Beccalossi, Chiara, 385, 391 Beckett, John, 232

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Beckson, Karl, 106 Bedborough, George, 132, 391 Bederman, G., 367 Beegan, Gerry, 326 Beer, Thomas, 27, 29, 34, 36, Plate 5 Beerbohm, Max, 29 ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’, 285 on Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), 283 Beetham, Margaret, 332, 335, 341n16 behaviourism, 148 belief, 106 Bell, Alexander Graham, 163 Bellamy, Edward, 230 Belsey, Catherine, 427 Bennett, Arnold Journalism for Women: A Practical Guide, 286 A Man from the North, 73, 80, 86 Bentham, Jeremy, 151 Bentley, E. C., 426 Benton, Megan, 32, 35 Berlin, 393–4, 395–6 Besant, Annie, 130–2 Besant, Walter, 70 The History of London, 70, 72, 79–80 Bibelot Press, 27–8 Bible, 129, 138–9, 345–6, 361 bibliophile market, 32, 37 Bildungsroman, crisis-of-faith, 132–8 biology, 153–4 Birmingham, 8 as setting for Russian-themed novels, 246 theatre in, 229, 231–2, 234, 236–40 see also Bournville village Birmingham Daily Post (newspaper), 232, 236–7, 239–40 Birmingham Owl (periodical), 233–4, 237–8 Birmingham Pictorial and Dart (periodical), 233–4, 238 birth control, 131–2, 388 ‘bitextuality’, 48 Bjornson, Bjornstjerne, A King, 307 Blackwood’s Magazine, 416 blasphemy, 127, 128 Blavatsky, H. P., 308, 309 Blind, Mathilde, The Ascent of Man, 139–41 Bloch, Iwan, 384, 392 blood sports, 151, 153, 156, 157, 158n7 Bloy, Léon, 108–11, 114–15 Blue Jay (Lady Jane Maria Strachey), ‘The Christmas Fleet’, 56, 56–8 Bock, Vera, 33 Bodenheim, Maxwell, 34 Bodley Head (publisher), 28, 30, 36, 284, 286 body and soul, 93, 96–7, 99 Boer War (1899–1902), 156, 169 bohemians, 26, 31, 33 Boni, Albert, 30–1 Boni and Liveright (publishers), 30–1, Plate 3 ‘Book and Art Shop, The’, 28 book design, 28, 35–6, 65 booklets, 32 booksellers, 26, 28, 31, 36–7, 41

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index ‘boom in yellow’, 29 Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People in London, 75 Booth, Edwin, 201 Borderland (magazine), 172 Bornstein, George, 26 Bose, Jagadish Chunder, 165 botany, 415 Botticelli, Sandro, 267 Bourdieu, Pierre, 26 bourgeoisie, 2, 27, 33, 115, 271, 427 Bourget, Paul, Le Disciple (The Disciple), 110 Bournville Almshouse Trust Ladies Visiting Committee, 225 Bournville village, 13–14, 215–26 founding of, 216–17, 226n6, 226n7 homemaking ideals, 217–19, 223 rules and regulations, 219–20 show homes, 216, 220–5, Plates 7–9 watercolour renderings of, 225 Bournville Village Trust (BVT), 220, 224–6 Bournville Works Magazine, 227n23 Boyd, Ernest, 39 boys’ adventure stories, 422n1 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 323 Bradlaugh, Charles, 125, 127, 129, 131–2 Bradlaugh Bonner, Hypatia, 129–30 Bradley, Katharine, 293 Bradshaw’s Guide, 174 Brady, S., 390 Brake, Laurel, 167, 284 Brantlinger, Patrick, 4 Brieux, Eugene, False Gods (La Foi) (trans. J. B. Fagan), 312–14, 313 Briggs, Laura, 363 British Agent (film), 248 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), 95–6, 98, 100, 104n3 British Empire, 4, 283 adventure novels, 401–4, 409, 416, 420, 422n1, 422n2 and detective fiction, 432–3 and information, 163, 169–71, 173, 175 and Ireland, 210 British Museum, 166 Brontë, Charlotte, 332, 341n1 Brontë, Emily, 341n1 Brooke, Emma, ‘Love and the Young Generation Open the Door’, 338–40, 339 Brooker, P., 66 Brooks, Michael, 53 Broomfield, Andrea, 337, 341n3 Brown, George Douglas, The House with the Green Shutters, 181 Brown, Horatio, 275, 278n10, 391 Browne, Stella, 388 Browning, Robert, 151 Bruno, Guido, 33 Bryce, James, Impressions of South Africa, 401–2, 406 Buchan, John, adventure novels, 407, 422n1 Buchanan, Robert, poetry, 184–5

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447

Burckhardt, Jacob, 270 Burdett, Osbert, 29, 30, 32 Burgess, Anthony, ‘The Lady of the Rains’, 63, 63 Burgess, Gelett, 28 Burgess, W. V., 414 Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry, 90 Burnside, John, 158 Burrell, Arthur, 59 Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth, 10, 106–21 Butcher, Fanny, 36 Butt, Isaac, 197 by-laws, housing, 215, 226n2 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron (Lord), Don Juan, 246 Cabell, James Branch, 34, 35, 38–9 Cadbury, Elizabeth, 216–21, 224, 225–6 Cadbury, George, 215–20, 222, 225–6, 226n10 Cadbury, Richard, 216, 224, 226n2 Cadbury family, 216, 217–19 Caird, Mona, 190–1, 291, 298n3 Calcraft, H. G., 351 Cambridge University, 125, 142n8, 290 Canine Defence League, 156 capitalism, 74, 113–14, 187, 345–6, 348, 422 Carlyle, Thomas, 113, 133, 184 Carman, Bliss, 29 Carpenter, Edward, 150, 153, 155–7, 388 Carr, Eilis, An Eviction in Ireland, and its Sequel, 199 Carruthers, Gerry, 188 Casanova, José, 125 Casenove, Pascale, 208, 276 Caslon Old Face (typeface), 65–6 Cassell (publisher), 52, 245, 258n6 Castle, Gregory, 203 Catholicism, 7–8, 10–11, 106–21 anti-Catholicism, 106, 107, 110, 119–20 authors, 106, 111–12 culture and politics, 107–9 English, 107–8, 113, 115–17 Irish, 196, 198, 199, 210 nostalgia, 112–17 against realism, 109–12 secularism and, 126 suffering and penance as art, 117–21 causal narratives, 78 celebrity, 309–10, 315–16, 324–9, 328, 329, 335 Cellini, Benvenuto, 270–1 Celticism, 188–9, 192, 202–5 censorship, 33, 37, 79 Centaur Bookshop of Philadelphia, 37 Century (magazine), 263 Century Guild Hobby Horse (magazine), 60–6, 61, 62 Century Guild of Artists, 60 Chapin, Alice, 315 Chapman, Alison, 9–10, 46–67 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 385 charity, 218 Charrington, Charles, 234–6, 238, 241 Chateaubriand, René, 114

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448 Chesterton, G. K., city writing, 72, 83–5 Chetwynd, Julie, 338 Chiang, Howard, 397n1 Chicago Literary Times, The, 37–8, 40 children, 209–10, 217 children’s fiction, 210, 248–9 Chiswick Press (publisher), 65 Christianity and Anglo-African adventure novels, 419 and secularism, 127, 129–31, 133–5, 137–8, 141, 143n11 see also Catholicism Christie, Agatha, 426, 432 Chums (boys’ story paper), 252 cinema see film circus animals, 152, 156 cities and secularism, 139 city writing, 7–8, 10, 70–86 and detective fiction, 427 detectives and mystics, 82–5 gothic aesthetics and, 91 impressionism, 76–82 methodologies, 74–6 perceptions, 70–4, 86n2 ‘civilisation’, 155, 157, 407, 409, 422n2 Claes, Koenraad, 49 Clarke, Edward, Sex in Education, 362–3 class Anglo-African adventure novels, 412, 414 and Italy, 265, 271–2 neurasthenia and, 366, 378n9 Scotland, 187–8 see also specific categories classicism, 157, 267–8, 390 Claudel, Paul, 109, 117, 118 Clements, Amy Root, 36 Clerkenwell slums, London, 75 Clifford, W. K., 140 Cobbe, Frances Power, 149 Cobbett, William, A History of the Protestant Reformation, 113 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 72, 86, 86n3 Cochrane, Claire, 231, 242 Codell, Julie, 63 Coetzee, J. M., 158 Coit, Emily, 18, 361–77 Colby, Vineta, 102 Coleridge, Christabel, 328 collaboration intergenerational, women’s periodicals, 322, 331–5, 340 sexology, 388–91, 398n18 theatre, 308, 315–18 collecting, 26, 32–3 Collins, Kevin, 203 Collins, Mabel, 301, 302, 308–10, 314–15 ‘At a Big Rehearsal’, 314 Cobwebs, 319n5 early plays, 315 In the Flower of Her Youth, 314 The Idyll of the White Lotus, 301, 303, 305, 308, 315

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index Lord Vanecourt’s Daughter, 311, 319n5 Outlawed (coll. Despard), 309, 315 Sensa: A Mystery Play in Three Acts, 301–8, 312, 314, 316–17 trefoil, 308–9, 309 work in the sensation press, 310–12, 311 Collins, Wilkie, 90, 151, 311, 432 colonialism, 74, 125–6, 170, 209–10, 409 communication, 164 subconscious, 99–102, 104 Communist writers, 74 ‘compassion’, 155 ‘comradeship’, 150 connoisseurship, 26, 32, 36 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness, 404, 416, 419–21 ‘Outpost of Progress’, 416 The Secret Agent, 73, 81, 84, 155, 248 consumerism, 6, 221, 323, 326, 332, 340, 341n16 contemporaneity, 3, 27 Contemporary Review (periodical), 152 conversion, Catholic, 106, 108 ‘conviction of sin’, 38 Cook, Eliza, 323 Cooke, William Fothergill, 164 Cooper, Edith, 293 copyright, 8 Corbett, D. P., 67 Corelli, Marie, 293, 335 A Romance of Two Worlds, 172 Cork Opera House, 201 Corkery, Daniel, 205 Cornhill Magazine, 246 Cosmopolis (periodical), 244 Cottin, Madame, Elizabeth; or, the Exiles of Siberia, 248 Court Theatre, London, 301, 307, 315, 316 Covici, Pascal, 33, 36–7 Crackanthorpe, Hubert, 295–6 ‘The Struggle for Life’, 79 craft building methods, traditional, 219 Craig, Cairns, 182–3, 186 Crane, Beatrice, ‘Legend of the Blush Roses’, 46–7, 47 Crane, Walter, Claims of Decorative Art, 46–7 creativity, 97–100, 308–10 ‘crises of faith’, 124, 132–8 criticism see art criticism; literary criticism Croke, T. W., 206 Crowley, Aleister, 309 cultural authority, 27, 37, 42 ‘cultural neo-formalism’, 58 cultural prestige, 41 culture industry, 186–7 Cunningham, Gail, 298 Cusack, Michael, 206 Custance, Olive, 294 cynicism, 34–5 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 267, 268 Daily Mail (newspaper), 168–9, 221

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index daily newspapers, 164, 167–9 Daily Telegraph (newspaper), 168 Daly, Nicholas, 186, 427, 428, 438n6 dandies, 26, 36 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 276–7 Dante, Alighieri, Purgatorio, 269 D’Arcy, Ella, 285, 286–8 Darlington Echo (newspaper), 253 Darwin, Charles, 146 Darwinian evolution and gothic fiction, 93, 98 and humanitarianism, 146 and Ireland, 209 and Scotland, 182 and secularism, 139–41 and women, 289, 297, 362, 363–4, 365–70 Davidson, Edward, 37 Davidson, John, 25, 74, 184, 193n5 city writing, 71–2, 78, 83 poetry, 78, 113, 181–2, 184, 188, 190 Davin, Maurice, 206 Davis, Tracy C., 235 death, 2, 25 death penalty, 151 decadence, 2, 4, 25–7, 41–2 in the American literary field, 29–41 anti-decadence, 2, 8, 25, 40–1, 296 and Catholicism, 106 city writing, 81, 84–5 decadent vs. ‘make it new’ modernists, 40–1 development within American modernism, 27–9 downmarket, 31–2 and gothic aesthetics, 97 in the home, 219 and Italy, 269 materiality, 32–3 as modernism, 30–1 ‘old’, 33, 35, 37–40 of periodicals, 67 poetry, 48–9 prestige of, 37–40 publishing revivals, 29–30 Scotland, 185, 192 secularism and, 126, 138 women, 294, 298 ‘decadent form of elitism’, 32 decadent modernism, 9, 25–6, 33, Plate 6 in literature and criticism, 37–40 vs. ‘make it new’ modernism, 40–1 and the new decadence, 33–7 ‘decadent revival’, 29 decorated poems, 10, 49–60, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57 decorative arts, 46–7, 62, 65 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 403 degeneration, 2, 3–4, 98–9, 101, 196, 203, 206, 209 Demerath, Nicholas J., III, 127 Demoor, Marysa, 49 Dering, E. H., 112 Derrida, Jacques, 158

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449

design, 47–9, 50, 53–4, 67 books, 28, 35–6, 65, Plate 3, Plate 5 Bournville village, 216, 218–19, 224 graphic, 47, 49, 53–4, 65–6 interior, 1, 219, 221–3 typography, 58, 60–7, 61, 62, 164 Design and Industries Association (DIA), 224 Despard, Charlotte, 309, 315 detective, as term, 425 detective fiction, 19–20, 82–5, 165, 425–8 The Beetle by Richard Marsh, 427–31, 438n8 Hilda Wade series by Grant Allen, 428, 431–3 The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle, 428, 434–7 determination, 373 diabolism, 27, 36 Dial (magazine), 53 diamond mining, 402, 409, 419 diaries, 245 Dickens, Charles, 75–6 Bleak House, 73, 82–3 Great Expectations, 75 Once a Week, 48 difficulty, 48 Digby, Kenelm Henry, Broad-Stone of Honour, 114 discontent, 291 disillusionment, 312 divorce, 197, 206 Dixie, Florence, 151, 153 Dixon, Ella Hepworth, 283, 284, 288, 288–90, 298n2 Dixon, Joy, 309, 314 Dodge, Mabel, 34 Dome, The (magazine), 9–10, 67 domestic magazines, 326 Donoghue, Emma, 293 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 244 double agents, 248 Double Dealer (little magazine), 34–5 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 21n8, 29, 119, 294 Dowie, Ménie Muriel, 283, 296, 296–7 Gallia, 296–8 A Girl in the Karpathians, 296, 296 Dowling, Linda, 4, 64–6 Dowson, Ernest, 25, 109, 119 Doxey, William, 28 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 186 ‘A Night Among the Nihilists’, 249 on detective fiction, 426 and Grant Allen, 431, 433 Sherlock Holmes, 72, 77, 83, 85, 165, 186, 425–8, 434–7 ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley’, 404 dramatic suffering, Catholicism, 117 dreams, 91, 98–100 Dreyfus, Alfred/Dreyfus affair, 108 Drotner, Kirsten, 326 Du Maurier, George, 266 duality, 2, 4, 91–4, 96, 99 Dunbar, Robert, 210 Dundee Advertiser (newspaper), 241 Dundee Evening Telegraph (newspaper), 241

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450

index

duty, 218, 341n10 Dwor, Richa, 17–18, 345–58 ‘dynamite novels’, 250 Eagleton, Terry, 185, 193n6, 198–208 Easley, Alexis, 17, 321–40 East End of London, 345, 350, 351, 356, 358n1, 417 Ecclesiastes (Bible), 163 ecstasy, 99, 140, 141 Edison, Thomas, 163 education, 133–4, 142n8; see also women’s education Egerton, George (Mary Shevalita Bright), 80–1, 82, 198, 283, 298n2 Keynotes, 285, 292, 298n1 The Wheel of God, 292–3 Elberskirchen, Johanna, 394 electricity, 164, 172 Eliot, George (Marion Evans), 151, 332 Eliot, T. S., 25, 101 Ellis, Edith Lees, 388 Ellis, Havelock, 149 and Russia, 258n6 Sexual Inversion, 385, 388–92, 398n18 Ellmann, Richard, 235 emerging American writers, 27–8 emotions, 147 empathy, 158n2 Empire Theatre of Varieties, Nottingham, 232 enchantment, 138–42 Engels, Friedrich, 74 Englishness, 2, 121 Enlightenment, 124, 127 environmentalism, 110, 158 épater-le-bourgeoisie status, 27 Era (magazine), 235–6, 242 Erdozain, Dominic, 126, 135 Esler, Erminda Rentoul, 338 esotericism, 37, 301, 305–8, 310–11, 317–18 ethics, 158n2 Etlinger, Florence, 317 Theatre School, 316–17, 319n11 eugenics, 297, 358n9, 369, 377 Evangelicalism, 129, 134–5, 254, 257, 346 imagery, 74, 84 morality, 126, 134 Evangelista, Stefano, 15, 263–77 Evans, Donald, 34 Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The (magazine), 13, 192–3 Everyman’s Library, 30 evolution see Darwinian evolution experimental drama, 202 expertise, 427 ‘exquisites, the’ (writers), 34, 37 Faber, Frederick W., The Foot of the Cross, 117 Faludi, Susan, 321 fame, 301, 308, 310 Fane, Violet, 335, 336 Farnell, Kim, 314

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Farrer, T. C., 232–3 fear, 434–5 feathers, 149, 158n4 Feis Ceoil Association, 206 Felski, Rita, 364 femininity, 8, 326, 338, 431–3, 438n9 feminism, 289–91, 309 anti-feminism, 324–5, 329, 337, 341n3 and sexology, 388, 393–4 and women’s periodicals, 321–2, 331–5, 337–8, 341n10 feminist criticism, 362, 364–5, 377, 378n6 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 140–1 fiction city writing, 75–6, 78–80 decadent, 37–40 invasion, 246, 259n8 Irish, 199–200 on Italy, 272–3 Nihilist romance, 251–2, 259n8 popular, 248–9 science, 201 sensation, 90, 301, 310–12, 311 in women’s periodicals, 338 see also Anglo-African adventure novels; children’s fiction; detective fiction; gothic fiction Field, Michael (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), 293 film, 163, 171, 395 fin de siècle current scholarship, 4–5, 20n3 as term, 1–2 as ‘turning point’, 5–7, 20n6 Findlater, Jane, The Green Graves of Balgowrie, 191 fine art see art Finney, Fred, 409 Firbank, Ronald, 34–5, 38 first person narration, 95 Fisher, Benjamin F., 287 Fisher, Kate, 384 flânerie, 26 Florence, Italy, 264, 273, 274 folklore, 205, 207–8, 406–7, 422n2 Foote, G. W., 127, 128, 130 Ford, Ford Maddox, 74, 76–7 Forrester, Andrew, The Female Detective, 430 Foster, Roy, 208 Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, 383–4 Foxwell, E., 232–3 fragmentation, 90–1, 96, 99, 101, 196, 197, 264 France, 1–2; see also French Catholicism; Paris Frankau, Julia (Frank Danby), 284, 356 Frankel, Nicholas, 48, 65 frankness, 79 Franzen, Jonathan, 376–7 Fraser, Marie, 235 Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough, 185, 189 free love, 286 free thought, 131–2, 134, 141 free will, 110, 112

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index freedom, 292, 430 Freeman, Nick, 10, 70–86, 91, 135, 139 French Catholicism, 11, 106–8, 113–14, 117, 119 Freud, Sigmund, 157, 385, 397n7, 397n12 Friede, Donald, 33 frivolity, 219 Funke, Jana, 384, 397n4 furnishings, 219, 221–3, 225 Fusato, Angelo, 271 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), 206 Gaelic games, 206 Gaelic revivalism, 203–5, 209 Gagnier, Regenia, 155 Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, 201 Galsworthy, John, Justice, 149 Galton, Arthur, ‘To the Century Guild’, 64–5 Galton, Frances, 358n9 garden city movement, 215, 216–17, 220 gardens and gardening, 217–18, 220 Garnett, Constance, 244, 245 Geddes, James Young, poetry, 181–2, 188 Geddes, Patrick, 13, 183, 192–3 Gekle, William, 33 gender, 4, 8, 294 and detective fiction, 430, 431–3 and the home, 215 and Ireland, 198, 199–200 and Scotland, 189–90 and sexology, 387, 393 text and image, 48, 60 gender identity, 3–4, 387, 393 generations, 25, 40 Jewish community, 347–9, 354 as term, 340 of women writers, 323–9, 325, 327, 328, 329 Gere, C., 215 German sexology (Sexualwissenschaft), 383–5 ‘conträre Sexualempfindung’ (contrary sexual feeling), 385 life writings, 389 work of Magnus Hirschfield, 385, 392–6, 398n39 German Women’s Movement, 393 Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesised work of art), 49 ghost stories, 102–4 Gibbon, Edward, 2 Gibson, Ralph, 108 Gilley, Sheridan, 107 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Herland, 366, 369 short fiction, 362, 363–70, 372, 374, 377, 378n6 Women and Economics, 362, 365–70, 377 ‘girl of the period’, 324–5, 325 girls’ periodicals, 326 Girton College, Cambridge University, 290 Gissing, George, 73, 75–6, 85, 86n6 ‘A Victim of Circumstance’, 78 Born in Exile, 132–6, 138, 142n8 Demos, 250

5540_Guy.indd 451

451

The Nether World, 75–6, 135 New Grub Street, 75, 166–7 Workers in the Dawn, 75 In the Year of Jubilee, 78 Gladstone, William, 197 Glanville, Ernest, Anglo-African adventure stories, 402, 411–14, 420 Godfrey, E., 438 ‘golden age’ of spiritualism and occultism, 126 Good Words (magazine), 49–50, 50, 58 Goode, John, 75 Gosse, Edmund, 71, 187, 238 gothic fiction, 7–8, 10, 90–104 duality and Arthur Machen, 91–4 ghost stories, Lee and Sinclair, 102–4 science and Wilde, 96–7 the self in Jekyll and Hyde, 91, 92–3, 94–6, 98–100 self-analysis and Dracula, 100–2 structure of, 90–1 subliminal self and Myers, 97–100 grace, 112 Grafton Theatre, Dublin, 201 Graham, Stephen, 257 gramophones, 163 Grand, Sarah, 198 ‘The New Woman and the Old’, 335, 337, 337, 339, 340 Grand Theatre, Birmingham, 232 Grand Theatre, Nottingham, 232 Grand Tour, the, 264, 265 graphic design, 10, 47, 49, 53–4, 65–6 Gray, Alice, 192 Gray, John, 120 Great Famine (1845–52), 196 Great Irish ‘Wake’: by One Who Was There, The (Anon), 200 Great War, 26 Greenwich Village, 33 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 202, 204 Griffith, George, The Angel of the Revolution, 251–2 Griffiths, Richard, 106, 117 Guiney, Louise Imogen, Lovers’ Saint Ruth’s, 116 Gyles, Althea, 294 Haggard, H. Rider, 401 King Solomon’s Mines, 403, 404, 407–8 Nada the Lily, 407–9 Halacha (Jewish law), 349, 354 Haldeman-Julius, E., 31–2 Hall, Radclyffe, The Well of Loneliness, 387 Hall, Stanley, Adolescence, 361–2 Halperin, David, 383 Hamilton, Elsie, 302, 305–6 Hamilton, Lisa K., 293–4 Hamlin, Kimberly A., 362, 363 Hand, Derek, 199 Hanson, Ellis, Decadence and Catholicism, 106, 119 Hansson, Heidi, 199–200 Hapgood, Lynne, Margins of Desire, 74

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452

index

Hardy, Thomas, 149, 154–5 Jude the Obscure, 132–8, 143n11, 154 poetry, 154–5 Harland, Aline (Renée de Coutans), 285 Harland, Henry, 286–7, 294 Harmsworth, Alfred, 168 Harper, E. and A. J., 224 Harris, Frank, 29 Harris, Wendell V., 284, 292 Harrison, Brian, 350 Hartle, Emma (also Hartles), 221–2, 224, 227n17 Harvey, William Alexander, 216, 218, 223, 226, 226n11 Harvie, Jen, 233 Haweis, Mary Eliza, 338 Hay, Helen, 192 healthy lifestyles, 217–18 Hecht, Ben, 34–6, 37–9, 40, Plate 4 hedonism, 26–7 Henebry, Fr. Richard, 204 Henley, W. E., 79 Henty, G. A., boys’ adventure stories, 210, 248, 422n1 Herbert, Christopher, 133 heredity, 110, 363–5, 373 Hergesheimer, Joseph, 34 Herzer, Manfred, 386 Hewitt, Martin, 340 high culture, 40–1 high modernism, 39, 101 high technology, 163, 173, 175 Hilton, Boyd, 130 Hindson, Catherine, 16–17, 301–18 Hirschfield, Magnus, 385, 392–6, 398n29 Hobbes, John Oliver (Pearl Craigie), 283 A School for Saints, 106, 111, 115 Hobson, Bulmer, 205 Hoffman, Maud, 301, 302, 308–9, 314, 315–16, Plate 11 Sensa: A Mystery Play in Three Acts, 301–8, 312, 314, 316–17 Holder, Heidi J., 229 Holroyd, Michael, 241 Holyoake, George Jacob, 124–6, 129 Home Rule fiction, 200–1 Home Rule for Ireland, 196–7, 200 homemaking, 219, 223 homes, 215–26, 274–6 homosexuality, 3, 8, 18–19, 132, 149–50 British sexology on, 388–92 gay rights, 393–5 German sexology (Sexualwissenschaft) on, 392–6 and Italy, 268, 270–1 lesbianism, 293–4, 387–8, 392–4 sexual sciences on, 383–8, 396 terminology, 385–8, 393 Horne, Herbert, 64, 74 Hornung, E. W., 426 Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, 377 Hoskins, L., 215 Houghton, R., ‘Easter: In Florence’, 54, 54–5, 55

5540_Guy.indd 452

‘house beautiful’, 215 Howe, Neil, 322 Hughes, Linda K., 48, 284 Hughes, Michael, 248 Hugo, Victor, Notre-Dame de Paris, 113–14 ‘humane’, 146, 158n1 Humane Review, The (journal), 151–2 Humanitarian, The (journal), 150, 158n6 Humanitarian League, 149–51, 156, 158n7 humanitarianism, 8, 11–12, 95, 141, 146–58, 158n1 humanity, 95–6 Humanity (journal), 150 Hume, Fergus, detective fiction, 430 Huneker, James, Painted Veils, 30, 35, 37–8 hunting, 154, 156 Huntington, Henry E., 28 Hurley, Kelly, 85, 429 Hurst, Isobel, 61 Huxley, Aldous, 34–5, 38 Huxley, T. H., 125–6 ‘The Struggle for Existence’, 148 Huysman, J. K. and Catholicism, 108–10, 113, 115, 117–18 decadent editions, 33, 35 Huyssen, Andreas, 326 Hyde, Douglas, 203–4 I. M. O., Priests and People: A No-Rent Romance, 199 Ibsen, Henrik, plays, 230, 234–42 productions outside London, 234–9, Plate 10 Ibsenism, 230 ‘ideal home’, 215, 221 idealism, 75, 211, 216 identity, 3–4, 8, 203, 387, 393 illustrated editions, 32, 35–6 illustrated poems, 46–9, 47, 59–60, 64 illustration, city writing, 74 illustrators, 48 Image, Selwyn, ‘A Christmas Carol’, 61–3, 61, 62 imaginative art, 64 imaginative literature, 172–3 ‘imagined communities’, 233 ‘immanent frame’, 124–5 immigration, 244–5, 363 imperialism, 156, 404, 429; see also British Empire impressionism, 2, 27, 76–82 Independent Theatre Company, 235, 241 Independent Theatre Society, 231, 235 India, 125, 169–70 indirectness, 48 individualism, 27, 106, 187 industrialisation, 113, 406 information, 8, 12, 162–75 books, news and knowledge, 166–9 and empire, 169–71 inventing, 163–6 occult, and telepath networks, 171–5 as term, 162, 167 inheritance, 210 Innis, Harold, 169

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index ‘instincts’, 146–7 Institute of Sexology, Berlin, 395–6 ‘institutions of modernism’, 26 integration, 101 intellect, 147, 363–4, 365–76 intellectuals, 31 interior design, 1, 219, 221–3 International Book Review, 38 invasion fiction, 246, 259n8 invention, 163–6 ‘inversion’ sexual sciences on, 383–8, 389, 396 terminology, 387–8 Ireland, 8, 13, 196–211 Catholicism, 107, 108 language, 196, 203 literary revival, 203–4 nationalism, and Russian Nihilism, 249–50, 251, 255–6 women writers, 286–7 Irish Literary Theatre, 202–4 Irish National Land League, 196, 199 Irish resistance movement, 196–7, 211n1, 434 Italian Renaissance, 266–8, 270, 276 Italy, 8, 15, 263–5, 275–7, 278n11 art for art’s sake, 265–9, 277n3 English aesthetes in, 269–75 literature, 269–70, 274, 276–7 modernisation of, 264–5 sexology, 385, 394 Ives, George, 149 Jack the Ripper, 310, 318n4 Jackson, Holbrook, 185, 186 The Eighteen Nineties, 1–2, 29, 30, 33, 197 Jacobs, Joseph, 358n9 Jäger, Gustav, Discovery of the Soul, 386 Jaillant, Lise, 31 James, Edward, 200 James, Henry In the Cage, 165 city writing, 70–3, 76–8, 85, 86n1, 263 ‘Death of a Lion’, 285 on Italy, 263, 267 The Princess Casamassima, 72, 81, 82, 250 James, William, ‘A Pluralistic Universe’, 230–1 Jameson, Frederic, 186 japonisme, 26 Jerrold, Blanchard, London: A Pilgrimage, 76 Jeune, Mary, 337, 340 Jewish Chronicle, The, 345, 355 Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR), 349, 355, 358n9 Jews and Judaism, 30, 108, 125, 245–7, 256, 345–6, 348; see also Liberal Judaism Johnson, Lionel, poetry, 25, 115–16, 120–1 Jones, Henry Arthur, 238 Joseph, Frances A., 355–6 journalism, 75, 80, 163, 167–9, 173 on Italy, 272–3 New Journalism, 167, 168, 322, 326, 335 on Russia, 253–4 women in, 286, 322, 326

5540_Guy.indd 453

453

Joyce, James, 31, 39, 74 ‘An Encounter’, 78 Dubliners, 78, 80, 86 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 86 Ulysses, 39, 86, 101 Judaism see Jews and Judaism; Liberal Judaism Jung, Carl, 421 kailyard narratives, 181, 183, 186 Kandinsky, Wassily, ‘The Art of Spiritual Harmony’, 307 Kaplan, Joel, 239 Karlovsky, Bertalan, The Brontolonis, 1, 2 Kassanoff, Jennie A., 372 Kazin, Alfred, 34 Keating, Geoffrey, 205 Keating, Peter, 80, 425 Keen, Henry, 32 Kelleher, Margaret, 201 Kennan, George, Siberia and the Exile System, 256 Kennedy, Carol, 218 Kennerley, Mitchell, 28, 36 Kermode, Frank, 182 Kern, Stephen, 168 Kerr, Lady Amabel, A Mixed Marriage, 111 Kertbeny, Karl-Maria, 386–7, 388 Kestner, Joseph, The Edwardian Detective, 425 Keynotes series, Bodley Head, 284, 286, 292 Kiberd, Declan, 86, 197, 205, 208 Killeen, Jarlath, 197, 198 Kingsford, Anna, 149–50 kinship, 153–4, 157–8 Kipling, Rudyard Kim, 169–71, 174, 246 ‘The Finest Story in the World’, 163, 172–3 Knopf (publisher), 32–3, 36, 39, Plate 3, Plate 5 Knopf, Alfred, 29 knowledge, 166–9 as term, 162 Knowlton, Charles, Fruits of Philosophy, 131–2 Knox, Ronald, ‘ten commandments’ for detective fiction, 428, 438n5 Ko, Charles, 101 Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen, 48 Koven, S., 349 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, Psychopathia Sexualis, 386, 390 Kreymborg, Alfred, 31 Kropotkin, Peter, works on humanitarianism, 151, 155 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 38 La Salette shrine, 108–9 labour laws, 345–6, 349 Labour Party, 157 Lady’s Pictorial (magazine), 290 Lady’s Realm (periodical), 322, 335–40, 336, 337, 339 Lady’s World (magazine), 47 Lamark, Jean-Baptiste, 150 Land War, Ireland, 196, 198–9 novels, 197, 199–201

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454

index

Lane, John, 28, 286–7, 291, 292 Lang, Andrew, ‘That Very Mab’ (coll. Kendall), 249, 250 Langton, John, Atlas of Industrialized Britain, 1780–1914 (coll. Morris), 231 Lankester, Edwin, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, 98–9 Laqueur, Thomas, 308 Laqueur, Walter, 230 Lark, The (little magazine), 28 Lasner, Mark Samuels, 285 latchkeys, 292, 338 Law, Michael John, 35 Lawrence, D. H., 73, 157 ‘Tickets, Please!’, 80 The White Peacock, 157 Le Gallienne, Richard, ‘A Ballad of London’, 74 Le Queux, William, works on Russia, 246, 247–8, 255 Le Théâtre Libre, Paris, 202 Leamington Spa Courier (newspaper), 241 Ledger, Sally, 181, 203, 230 Lee, Klaudia Hiu Yen, 21n7 Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 102–4 Euphorion, 273 on Italy, 263, 273–5 Max Beerbohm on, 283 ‘Oke of Okehurst: Or, The Phantom Lover’, 102–3, 104n6 Leerssen, Joep, 202 legends, Irish, 207–8 Legitimation League, 132, 391 Leighton, Angela, 58, 60 Leighton, Frederick, Baron, 49, 62 Leo XIII, Pope, 108, 116 lesbianism, 293–4, 387–8, 392–4 Lester, Edward, 200 Lethaby, W. R., 219 letterpress, 64, 65 letters, 166 Leverson, Ada, 284 Levy, Amy, 59, 81, 275 Lewis, Thomas, 223, 227n20 Lewis, Wyndham, 40 Liberal Judaism, 17–18, 345–58, 358n2, 358n5 generational rifts, 347–9, 358n3 Sabbath and socialism, 349–52 social work and theology, 352–7 liberalism, 124, 127 life writing, German homosexual, 389 limited edition format, 35 Lingan, Edmund B., 305, 307 Linge, Ina, 18–19, 383–96 linotype, 163 Linton, Eliza Lynn The One Too Many, 291 ‘The Girl of the Period’, 291, 324–5, 325, 330, 341n3 literary circles, Italy, 274–5 literary criticism, 37–40, 41, 43n18 literary culture, women writers, 284 literary journals, Italian, 274

5540_Guy.indd 454

literary scene, ‘sophisticated’, 34–6 literary writing and sexology, 395 Little Blue Books, 32, Plate 1 little magazines, 27–9, 33, 35, 41 Little Review, 40 ‘little riot of decadence’, 28 Liveright, Horace, 30–1, 41 Livingstone, David, 187 local authority housing, 219, 223, 226n1, 226n9 Lockhart, Robert Bruce, 248 Lodge, Oliver, 164, 171–2 Loftie, W. J., A History of London, 72 Lohn, John, 36 London East End, 345, 350, 351, 356, 358n1, 417 immigration, 244–5 theatre, 231–2, 312–16, 313 see also city writing London Journal, 252 London Times, The (newspaper), 401 London Zoo, 156 Longueville, Thomas, A Romance of the Recusants, 116–17 Longworth, Deborah, 33 Lourdes shrine, 108, 109–10, 113, 114 Loüys, Pierre, Psyche, Plate 2 Lucas, E. V., A Wanderer in London, 71 Luckhurst, Roger, 85, 203, 230 Lyons, Sara, 11, 124–42 Lysaght, Elizabeth, Jack-a-Dandy; or, The Heir of Castle-Fergus, 210 Mac Néill, Eoin, 204 MacColl, D. S., 78 ‘MacDermott’s War Song’, 246, 247 Macdonald, Leila, 295–6 The Love of the Poor, 295 Macdonald, W., 192 Machen, Arthur, 33, 37–8, 83 Excavations, 38 gothic fiction, 90–4, 96–7 Hieroglyphics, 82, 92–4, 97, 99 The Hill of Dreams, 84, 86n8, 92 Precious Balms, 84–5 The Three Impostors, 70, 86 Mackmurdo, A. H., 63–4 MacLeod, Fiona (William Sharp), 189–90, 284 MacLeod, Kirsten, 9–10, 25–42, 84 McBride, Robert, 35 McClintock, Letitia, A Boycotted Household, 199 McCracken, Scott, 181 McCracken-Flesher, Caroline, 12–13, 181–93, 203 McGann, Jerome J., 26, 48 McGuinness, Patrick, 305 McLaughlan, Robbie, 421 McNulty, Eugene, 205 McSwiney, Terence, 205 Macmillan and Company (publisher), 70–1, 128 Macmillan’s Magazine, 324 ‘mad woman in the attic’ figure, 332 ‘madness’, 25 Magazine of Art, The, 48, 52, 52–3, 54, 55

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index magazines, 29, 33, 39, 47–9, 57–62, 66–7, 167 little, 27–9, 33, 35, 41 see also periodical press Magnan, Valentin, 385 Maher, Mary, Fidelity, 111 Mahoney, Kristin, 25 Majeska (Henriette Stern), Plate 2 ‘make it new’ modernism, 25–7, 31, 34, 40–2, 42n1, 104 maleness, 283–4, 431–3 Mancini, Elena, 393 Mann, Franziska, 394, 395 manufacturing, 163 Marian devotion, 108, 117 Markey, Ann, 13, 196–211 marriage, 228, 285, 290–1 Marriott Watson, Rosamund, ‘Of the Earth, Earthy’, 138–9 Marsh, Joss, 128, 132 Marsh, Richard The Beetle, 85, 91, 427–31, 438n8 Judith Lee stories, 430–1, 438n9 Marshall, G., 4, 20n4 Martyn, Edward, 202, 205 Marx, Karl, 74, 350 Mascagni, Pietro, 273 masculinity, 8, 283–4, 431–3 Mason, A. E. W., 239–40, 242n5 Massingham, Harold J., 149 Masurel-Murray, Claire, 116 Matcham, Frank, 232 materialism, 48, 107, 110 Mathews, P. J., 205, 208–9 Mattar, Sinead Garrigan, 208–9 ‘mauve decade, the’, 27–9 Maxwell, Catherine, 102 Mayne, Ethel Colburn, 286–8 Meade, L. T., 59, 198 media, 2, 162–3, 164–5, 326; see also information; specific areas medical science, 91 melodrama, 202–3, 232, 248 memoirs, 26, 29–30, 155, 249–50, 389 Mencken, H. L., 27, 37, 39 Menke, Richard, 12, 91, 162–75 ‘mental evolution’, 146–8 Merriman, Henry, With Edged Tools, 414–17 metaphysics, 92, 96 Mew, Charlotte, ‘Passed’, 81–2 Meyer, Michael, 354 Meynell, Alice, 113, 117 Michelangelo, 270–1 Middle Ages, 26, 113–16, 118, 266 middle-class anxieties, 230 middle-class girlhood, 59–60 middle-class magazines, 58 middle-class secularism, 127 middle-class tourism, 264, 265, 266 middle-class women, neurasthenia, 366 middle-class women writers, periodicals, 323–4 middle-classes in Ireland, 210 Mill, John Stuart, 127

5540_Guy.indd 455

455

‘minor poets’, 29, 74 Mirbeau, Octave, 113 mise en page, 48, 51, 53, 56, 58, 67 missionary narratives, 401 Mitchell, Sally, 59, 331 Mitchell, Silas Weir, 362, 364 Mitford, Bertram, Anglo-African adventure novels, 404–6, 409–11, 414, 422n2 M’lle New York (little magazine), 29 Modern Library of the World’s Best Books, 30–1, 35, 39, Plate 1 ‘Modern Maid, The’, poem in Birmingham Owl, 238 modernisation of Italy, 264–5 modernism, 2, 4, 90–1, 102–3 ‘make it new’, 25–7, 31, 34, 40–2, 42n1, 104 modernism and decadence, 25–7, 41–2 in the American literary field, 27–9 decadence as modernism, 30–1 development of American, 27–9 ‘make it new’ modernists vs. ‘decadent modernists’, 40–1 publishing revivals, 29–30 modernist housing, 221, 227n16 modernity, 2–3, 31, 115, 119, 124, 263–4 Moll, Albert, 389, 392, 397n15 Monsman, Gerald, 19, 401–22 Montagu, Lily, 347–9, 357–8, 358n3 social work and theology, 352–7, 358n6 ‘The Spiritual Possibilities of Judaism To-Day’, 347, 349, 356–7 Montagu, Samuel, 347–9, 358n3 Montefiore, Claude, 349, 354–6, 358n5 Moore, Brenna, 118 Moore, Frank F., Ireland a Nation: The Diary of an Irish Cabinet Minister, 200 Moore, George, 199, 205 morality, 78, 126, 132, 137, 156, 269, 296 Moran, D. P., 204 Moran, James J., Two Little Girls in Green: A Story of the Land League, 199–200 Moran, Maureen, 112 Morash, Christopher, 202 Morgan, C. Lloyd, 148 Morning Post (newspaper), 241 Morris, R. J., Atlas of Industrialized Britain, 1780–1914 (coll. Langton), 231 Morris, William, city writing, 74–5, 82, 230 Morrison, Arthur, Tales of Mean Streets, 79–80 Morrison, Mark S., 307 Morse, Samuel, 164 Morton, A. L., 230 Moruzi, Kristine, 59 Mosher, Thomas, 27–8 mother figures, 321, 323, 331 ‘mother-daughter divide’, 321 motherhood, 362–3, 365–76, 377 Muddiman, Bernard, 29 Mulholland, J. R., 232 Mulholland, Rosa Banshee Castle, 210 Marcella Grace, 199

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456

5540_Guy.indd 456

index

Müller, Max, 95–6 multifacetedness, 186 multiplex telegraphy, 163 Murphy, James H., 199 Murray, Alex, 42n14, 350 music, 3, 205–6 musical composition, 302, 305–6, 306 Musical Standard (periodical), 313 music-hall, 246 ‘muzziness’, 25 Myers, F. W. H., works on personality, 97–100, 101–2, 104 mysticism, 82–5, 93

Noble, Frances, The Temptation of Norah Leecroft, 111–12 Nord, Deborah Epstein, 81 Nordau, Max, Entartung (Degeneration), 3, 96, 206, 230, 293 nostalgia, 26, 29, 33, 107, 112–17, 402 Nottingham Evening Post (newspaper), 234, 237, 238–9 Nottingham theatre, 8, 229, 231–2, 234–9, 242n5 novellas, 78 Novelty Theatre, Nottingham, 234–5 Novikoff, Olga, 247, 252, 253, 259n16 Nunberg, Geoffrey, 162

Näcke, Paul, 394 Nandy, Ashis, 209 Narodnaya Volta (‘People’s Will’) terrorist group, 247, 251 narration, 95 Nash, Andrew, 186 Nash, David, 129–30 National Literary Society, 204 National Observer (newspaper), 79 naturalism, 2, 109–10, 132–8 nature and health, 217 ‘naughty nineties’, 26 Nencioni, Enrico, 274–5 Nesbit, Edith, The Railway Children, 248 networks, artistic and literary, 26, 33–4, 38, 308, 316–18 neurasthenia, 364–6, 378n9 ‘new, the’, 2, 9, 230, 232, 234 New Age philosophy, 130 ‘new decadence’, 26–7, 33–40 ‘new drama’, 230, 234, 236–7 ‘new girls’, 56, 59–60, 322–6, 331–2, 335, 338 ‘New Hedonism’, 157 New Imperialism, 169 New Journalism, 167, 168, 322, 326, 335 ‘New Order of Critical Values, The’ (article), 39 ‘New Sexuality’, 391 ‘New Woman’, 4, 8, 16, 283, 286, 291–8 in adventure novels, 412 in Irish literature, 198, 200 ‘nervousness’ of, 363 periodicals, 322–6, 325, 332, 335, 337, 337, 340 readers, 323 as term, 198, 200 and theatre, 230, 232, 234, 238, 309–10 New York Tribune, 39 New Yorker (magazine), 376–7 Newey, Katherine, 230, 231, 234, 235, 242 Newman, John Henry, 108, 142 Newnes, George, 166–7 newspaper publishing, 39, 166–9 Nic Niocaill, Eibhlín, 210 Nicholas II of Russia, 254 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 126, 133, 298 Nietzscheanism, 157 Nightingale, Florence, 323 Nihilism, 245, 247–53 Nihilist romance fiction, 251–2, 259n8

Ó Conchubhair, Brian, Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge, 209 Oberg, Edward, 393 objets, 32, 36 obscenity, 131–2, 391 occultism, 126, 163, 171–5, 307, 308, 312, 314 O’Grady, Hubert, 201 ‘old lady’ figure, 321–5, 325, 327–8, 328, 332, 335 O’Leary, Philip, 205 Olin-Ammentorp, J., 375 Once a Week (magazine), 48 opera, Italian, 273 Oppenheim, E. Phillips, The Mysterious Mr Sabin, 251 oppression, 364 orientalism, 26 Orwell, George, ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, 425 Osbourne, Lloyd, 183, 194n8 O’Toole, Tina, 198 Ouida on Italy, 263, 269–74 ‘New Woman’ term, 291 A Village Commune, 272 Owen, Alex, 130, 312 Oxenham, John, Hearts in Exile, 248 Oxford University, 125, 137, 142n8, 270 pacifism, 156 Pagan Review, The (magazine), 185–6, 189, 190 paganism, 267 Pageant, The (gift book/magazine), 66–7 Paine, Thomas, 127 Palace Theatre, Nottingham, 232 Pall Mall Gazette (newspaper), 252, 253, 254 pamphlets, 33 Papé, Frank C., 35 paperback publishing, 41–2, Plate 6 Paris, France, 1, 202, 264, 276 Paris Commune, 151–2 Parker, Barry, 219 Parkes, Kineton, 236 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 197, 206–8 Parsons, Deborah, 81 passion, 263 Pater, Walter, 25, 27 on adventure novels, 405 on Italy, 263, 265–9 The Renaissance, 49, 268

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index paternalism, 216, 219–20 patriarchy, 364 patronage, 287 Pearse, Patrick, 204 Pearson, Karl, 140 Pearson’s Magazine, 165 Pecora, Vincent, 127, 135–6 ‘Pen and Pencil Club’, 236 penance as art, 107, 117–21 Pennell, Elizabeth, 29 Pennell, Joseph, 29, 33 People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, 156–7 perception, 81 Performing Animals’ Defence League, 156 ‘periodical codes’, 48, 56, 65, 67 periodical press, 26, 46, 48, 49, 60, 67 anonymous publication in, 323–4, 327 decorated poems, 10, 49–60, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57 illustrated poems in, 46–9, 47, 59–60, 64 of the Secularist movement, 128 and spiritualist theatre, Sensa, 301, 311–12 see also magazines; women’s periodicals periodisation, 229 persuasion, 215–26 perversion, 27 pessimism, 136, 184–5 philanthropy, 218, 219, 223 philosophy and humanitarianism, 153, 158, 158n2 phonography, 163, 171 photography, 171, 223–4, 325, 335, 395 Pike, Burton, 72 pilgrimage, 108–9, 114 Pinero, Arthur Wing, plays, 238–42 Pirkis, Catherine Louisa, detective fiction, 430 Pittard, Christopher, 427 Plato, Symposium, 387 ‘poète maudit’, 2 poetry, 2, 7, 9, 46 city writing, 77–8 decorated poems, 10, 49–60, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57 illustrated poems, 46–9, 47, 59–60, 64 Irish, 208 ‘minor poets’, 29, 74 new decadent, 34 ‘poetic form’, as term, 58–9 typographical design, 60–7, 61, 62 women writers, 284 poetry volumes, 29–30, 32 Poilishe Yidl (Yiddish-language newspaper), 351 police, 425–6, 430 ‘polite erotica’, 32, 35–6 Pondorevo, Edward, 73 Ponsonby, Margaret, 13–14, 215–26 popular culture, 2, 40 popular fiction, 248–9; see also sensation fiction postcards, 166 ‘post-decadent’ aesthetic, 33 Postlewait, Thomas, 229 Pound, Ezra, 25, 31, 40–1, 42n1, 156 poverty, 2, 199

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457

Praz, Mario, 275 prejudice, 265 Pre-Raphaelitism, 26, 52–3, 60, 63, 266, 275, 278n11 present tense, 80–1 Press Association, 168 prestige, 37–40 prettiness, 370–6 ‘primitive’ concept, Ireland, 209 ‘primitive’ school, 266 Primoli, Giuseppe, 275 Prince of Wales Theatre, Birmingham, 232, 239–40 printing technologies, 48, 168 prison reform, 149 production quality, 61 professional range, 308–10 professionalism, 186, 427 professional-managerial class, 27 propaganda, 247 propriety, 294–5 prosecution, 36 Protestant Ascendancy, Ireland, 196, 198–9, 210 Protestantism, 30, 112, 196, 199, 346 providence, 83–4 provincial theatre see theatre outside London provinciality, 40 Pseudonym Library, eighteen-pence books, 284 psychiatry, 386 psychology, 110, 146–8 of childhood, 209–10 public houses (pubs), 217, 350 publicity, 40, 310 publishing industry, 2, 10, 28–32, 35, 39, 40–2, 79, 128 sometime publishers, 28 women in, 284, 286–7 Pugin, A. W. N., Contrasts, 114, 115 Pulham, Patricia, 102 Punch (magazine), 266, 293 Puritanism, 156, 219 Quakerism, 217 Quarterly Review, 78, 172 Queen’s Royal Theatre, Dublin, 201–2 Quillard, Pierre, 305 Quinn, John, 31, 34 race, and women’s bodies, 363, 365–70, 377, 378n6 ‘race suicide’, 363 Rachilde, Monsieur Venus, 33 racism, 156, 403, 405 Radford, Andrew, 137 radicalism, 32, 90, 125, 127–32 radio, 165 railways, 232–3 Rainey, Lawrence, 26, 41 Randolph, Edmund, Mostly Fools, 107, 116 Ransome, Arthur, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study, 29 rapture, 139, 141 Rascoe, Burton, 38, 39 rationalism, 124, 131

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458

index

Rationalist Press Association, 128 reactionaries, 90 reading by women, 59 realism, 76–7, 81–2 and adventure novels, 403, 405 Catholicism against, 107, 109–12 Irish theatre, 205 theatre, 205, 234–8, 313 women writers, 293 Rechtenwald, Michael, 124–5, 128 Reclus, Elisée, work on humanitarianism, 151–3, 159n17 ‘The Great Kinship’, 152–3 recording technology, 171 recusants, 108, 116–17 referencing, writers of writers, 38 regeneration, 203 Reitz, Caroline, 19–20, 425–37 relativism, 133, 134 religion, 74, 267–8, 309, 313; see also Catholicism; Liberal Judaism; secularism Renaissance, 115 reportage, 79 representation, literary, 78, 80 representational art, 63–4 reprint market, 26, 30 retired people, Bournville village, 224–5, 226n4 Reuters, 168 reverse colonisation, 173–4 Review of Reviews (journal), 167 revivalism, 203–9 Rhodes, Cecil, 404 Rhodes, R. Crompton, 233 Richards, Thomas, 162, 170 Ricketts, Charles, illustrations, 52, 53, 55–7, 66 Robertson, J. M., A Short History of Freethought, 131 Robins, Elizabeth, 235, 241 Robinson, A. Mary F., 275 Robinson, Alan, 72 Robinson, Jo, 14, 229–42 Rochelson, Meri-Jane, 249 Roden, Frederick, 119 Rogers, Stephen, 33 Rogue (little magazine), 33 Rolfe, Frederick William, ‘Triolet’, 59–60 Romanes, George, works on mental evolution, 146–8 romanticism, 4 Rome, Italy, 264, 267 Röntgen, Wilhelm, 171 Rossetti, Christina, poetry, 50–4, 51, 52, 323 Rossetti, D. G., The Early Italian Poets, 266, 277n2 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 51, 53, 60, 410 Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (poems), 28, 32 ruins, 115, 269 Rüling, Anna (Theodora Anna Sprüngli), 394 rural life, idealisation, 216 Ruskin, John, art criticism on Italy, 263, 265–9 Ruskin Hall, Bournville village, 217 Russett, Cynthia Eagle, 364, 367

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Russia, 8, 14–15, 244–5 Jewish migration to Britain, 346–7, 350, 351 Nihilist theatre and literature, 247–50 perceptions of war and politics, 245–7 Stepniak and Nihilism, 250–3 W. T. Stead on, 252, 253–8 Sabbath, 346–52, 357 sacrifice, 107 saints, 115–16 Salberg, Derek, 232 Saler, Michael, 4–5, 20n2 sales figures, 41 salons, 275 Salt, Henry S., 148–51, 155–6, 159n20 Seventy Years Among Savages, 155–6 Saltus, Edgar, 28–9, 37–8 Sand, George, 323 Satterfield, Jay, 30 Saturday Review of Literature, 37, 297, 307, 324 Saunders, Max, 76 Savoy (magazine), 295, 295 scandal, 32, 295–8, 391 Scandinavia, 298n2 scarcity in design, 61 scepticism, 109 Schaffner, Anna Katharina, 384 Schlesinger, Kathleen, 306 school of decadent writing, 38–9 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 136, 184 Schreiner, Olive, adventure novels, 388, 403–6, 418 Schroder house, 227n16 Schwarz, Laura, 132 science, 91, 93, 95–7, 171, 182–3 science fiction, 201 scientific discovery, 163 scientific literature, 75 Scotland, 8, 12–13, 181–93 Celticism, 188–9, 192 theatre in, 235–6, 241 writers, 181–3 Scott, Clement, 324 Scott, Malcolm, 109 Scott, Richenda, 218 Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe, 114, 415, 416 Scully, W. C., Between Sun and Sand, 417–19 Seaman, Owen, 293 second industrial revolution, 163 ‘secularisation of sin’, 126 secularism, 8, 11, 124–42 and Catholicism, 106, 113 and enchantment, 138–42 naturalism and the crisis-of-faith Bildungsroman, 132–8 organised Secularist movement, 127–32 Seldes, Gilbert, 39 self-analysis, 100–2 self-assertion, 291 self-consciousness, 65–6, 73, 90 self-definition, 290 selfhood, 4, 8, 94–100

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index self-improvement, 134 self-indulgence, 26 Senelick, Laurence, 247–8 Sensa: A Mystery Play in Three Acts (Collins and Hoffman), 16–17, 301–5, 318 cultural and creative intersectionality, 308–10 productions and theatre networks, 316–17 and theatrical symbolism, 305–8 and the West End commercial theatre, 312, 314–16 sensation fiction, 90, 301, 310–12, 311 sensationalism, 90, 112, 322 ‘sense of an ending’, 3, 182, 183 serialised novels, 73 set-piece descriptions, 78 settler novels, 403 sex as subject matter, 32 sex in fiction, 79, 293 sexology, 18–19, 383–8, 396 British, 388–92 German (Sexualwissenschaft), 392–6 terminology, 385–8, 397n1, 397n5 ‘sexual anarchy’, era of, 363, 377 sexual depravity, 27 sexual difference, 362, 363–4, 365, 377 sexual radicalism, 150 sexuality, 3, 131–2, 157, 185, 286, 293–4, 297; see also homosexuality Shafts (women’s periodical), 322, 329–32, 330, 337, 341n13 Shannon, Charles, 53, 66 Shannon, Claude, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, 164 Sharp, Elizabeth, 189–90 Sharp, Evelyn, 286, 291, 298n2, 298n3 Sharp, William, 185–6, 189–90; see also MacLeod, Fiona (William Sharp) Shaw, Flora, Castle Blair, 210 Shaw, George Bernard, 149, 157, 235, 242n4 Candida, 241, 242n6, Plate 10 and Ireland, 197 Plays for Puritans, 239 Saturday Review columns, 239 Shepstone, Sir Theophilus, 408 Sherry, Vincent, 25 Shiel, M. P., 38 ‘shilling shockers’, 85 short stories, 78 show homes, 216, 220–5 Showalter, Elaine, 3–4, 181, 363 Shrimpton, Nicholas, 136, 182–4 Sibthorp, Margaret Shurmer, 329, 331 Sims, George R. detective fiction, 430 Living London, 244–5 Sims, Michael, 427 sin, 110, 126 sincerity, 134–5 Sinclair, May, ghost stories, 102–4 single-volume novels, 78 Singley, Carol, 375 Sinnett, Alfred, Married by Degrees, 316

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Sketch (periodical), 325, 326–7, 327 ‘sketches’ (literary form), 78–9 slavery, 403–4, 416 Slinn, E. Warwick, 58 slum life, 75 small presses and publishers, 27–8, 34 Smith, A. J. M., 38 Smith, Andrew, 10, 77, 83, 85, 90–104 Smith, Wallace, 35–6, Plate 4 ‘snobism’, 34 social consciousness, 312 social housing, 215, 216 ‘Social Question’, 130 social work, 352–7 socialism, 338, 346, 347, 349–52 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 166 Society of Psychical Research, 96, 97, 102 sociology, 75 solidarity, 321, 322 Solomon, Barbara, 372 South Africa, adventure novels, 401–2 spatialisation, 14, 229 Spence, Jean, 353 Spenser, Edmund, Faery Queene, 64 Spielmann, Marion Henry, 53 ‘spiritual dandyism’ (Griffiths), 106 spiritualism and humanitarianism, 149–50 and secularism, 126 and technology, 171–2 in the theatre, 308, 310, 314 see also Sensa: A Mystery Play in Three Acts spirituality, 419; see also spiritualism Spohr, Max, 393 sport, 206 Stange, Robert, 74 Stanley, Henry Morton, 187 Star of Erin Music Hall, The, 201 Stead, W. T., 167, 172, 245 on Russia, 252, 253 on Sergey Stepniak, 257 Truth About Russia, 252, 253–8 Stein, Gertrude, 34 Steinach, Eugen, 395 Stepniak, Sergey, 245 The Career of a Nihilist, 250–3 Underground Russia, 251 W. T. Stead on, 257 Stern, Henriette (Majeska), Plate 2 Stettheimer, Florine, 36 Stetz, Margaret, 285 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 183, 187, 193n5 ‘A Chapter on Dreams’, 187 The Dynamiter (coll. Mrs Stevenson), 249 The Ebb-Tide (coll. Osbourne), 183–4, 194n8 New Arabian Nights, 85 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 85, 91–6, 98–100, 181, 183 The Wrecker, 187 Stewart, Bruce, 198 Stöcker, Helene, 393–4

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460 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 90–1, 100–2, 104, 163, 173–5, 198, 428, 438n6 Stokes, John, 11–12, 95, 146–58, 235, 238–9 Strahan, Alexander, 58 Strand, The (magazine of detective fiction), 426, 430, 431, 434 Strand Magazine (women’s periodical), 326–8, 328, 329 Strauss, William, 322 Stretton, Hesba, In the Hollow of His Hand, 248–9 ‘study, the’ (literary piece), 78 Stutfield, Hugh E. M., 293 stylisation, 48 ‘subjective art’ poems, 64 subjectivity, 76 subliminal self, the, 97–100 subversiveness, 27, 36 suffering as art, 107, 109, 117–21 Suffragette (periodical), 322, 332–5, 333, 334 suffragettes and women’s suffrage, 132, 151, 309 suicide, 25 Summers, Lawrence, 377 Sunday Trading Bill (1855), 350 Sutherland, John, 73 Swan, Annie Shepherd, A Son of Erin, 200 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 140, 247 symbolism, 2 city writing, 81–3 European movement, 26 gothic fiction, 92–3 illustrated poetry, 48 of latchkeys, 292, 338 theatrical, 305–8, 312–16, 313 Symonds, John Addington ‘Ave Imperatrix’, 62 ‘In the Key of Blue’, 272 and Italy, 263, 269–74, 275–6 Renaissance in Italy, 270 and sexology, Sexual Inversion, 388–91, 398n18 Symons, Arthur, 25 on decadent writing, 81 ‘Introduction’ to Selected Poems of Mathilde Blind, 140 ‘London: A Book of Aspects’, 74, 86, 86n3 memoirs, 29 poetry, 77–8, 85–6, 141–2 and Russia, 258n6 The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 82 Syrett, Netta, Nobody’s Fault, 286 ‘talkaphone’, 171 Tamassia, Arrigo, 385 taste, 2–3, 31, 37, 38, 40, 219, 266 Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, 124 Taylor, Edward, 137 technology, 162–5, 171 telegraphy and telegrams, 163–6, 168 telepathy, 171–5 telephones, 163, 171 temperance literature, 84 temporality, 230

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index Tennyson, Alfred Lord ‘1865–1866’, 49, 50 In Memoriam, 139 terrorism, 84, 247–9, 251–2, 434–6 Terry, Ellen, 241 text and illustration, boundaries, 60–1 textuality, 48, 91, 94 Thacker, A., 66 theatre, 16, 201–3, 205, 301 collaboration, 318 networks, 316–17 suffrage productions, 309 symbolism, 305–8, 312–16 West End, 312–16, 313 Theatre of Ireland Company, 205 theatre outside London, 14, 229–42 first runs and G. B. Shaw, 241, 242n6, Plate 10 geographies, 229–32, 234–5 plays of Arthur Wing Pinero, 238–41 plays of Henrik Ibsen, 234–8, Plate 10 regional and national cultures, 232–4 Theatre Royal, Birmingham, 232–4, 239 Theatre Royal, Dublin, 201 Theatre Royal, Nottingham, 232, 235, 241, Plate 10 Theosophical Society, 303, 305–7, 306, 309–10, 316, 317 theosophy, 308–9 Third Republic (Le Ralliement), 108 Thomas, M. Carey, 361–2, 363, 377 Thompson, F. M. L., 217 Thompson, Francis, ‘The Hound of Heaven’, 120 Thompson, Vance, 28–9 Thomson, Graham R. (Rosamund Ball), 294–5 Thomson, J. Arthur, naturalist essays, 192–3 Thomson, James, The City of Dreadful Night, 78, 84, 181, 184 thrillers, 246 Thurston, Katherine Cecil, 198 Tice, Clara, 33 Time (magazine), 236 Times, The (newspaper), 167–8, 315 Tingley, Katharine, 306 Tit-Bits (newspaper), 166–7 titillation, 32 Tobin, Robert Deam, Peripheral Desires, 384 Tolstoy, Leo, and Tolstoyanism, 244, 257 Tomahawk (periodical), 324, 324–5 totalisation, 153–4 touring theatre, 235 tourism, 264, 265 Tracy, Louis, The Final War: A Story of the Great Betrayal, 246 trade publishers, 26, 40–1 trade unionism, 346, 347, 351 ‘tragic generation’, 2, 25 Traill, Henry Duff, 238 translation, 244, 266, 271, 276–7 travel guides, 266, 393 travel literature and detective fiction, 427 on Russia, 245, 249, 257, 259n16 women’s, 296, 296 see also Anglo-African adventure novels

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index Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 248, 312–13 Tristram, William Outram, The Red Lamp, 248 Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now, 73 Trollope, T. A., What I Remember, 250 Trotter, Mary, 202 truth, 81 Tucker, Herbert, 141 Turgenev, Ivan, 244 Turner, Frank, 134 Tusan, Michelle, 332 Tylor, Henry Bedford, 217 Tynan, Katharine, 208 typewriters, 162, 163, 173–5 typography, 60–7, 61, 62, 164 ‘uglinesses’ in city writing, 79 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, Urning (term), 387, 388, 389, 397n10 Ulster Literary Theatre, 205 universalism, 150 ‘unmethodical man, the’, 74 ‘untidy lives’, 25 Unwin, Raymond, 219 Unwin, T. Fisher, 284 upper-class Catholicism, 107 upper-class secularism, 135 upper-class women, neurasthenia, 366 ‘Uranism’ sexual sciences on, 384–8, 392, 396 terminology, 387–8 ‘urban pastoral’, 74 urban writing see city writing utopianism, 230 vaccination, 151 Vadillo, Ana, 81 vagabonds, 26 vampires and vampirism, 33, 100–1 Van Vechten, Carl, decadence novels, 33–9, Plate 5 Vaninskaya, Anna, 14–15, 244–59 Vanity Fair (magazine), 39 Vatican galleries, 267–8 vegetarianism, 149–52, 309 Venice, Italy, 264, 265, 269, 271 verismo (Italian realism), 272–3 Verlaine, Paul, ‘Mon Dieu m’a dit’, 110 visual art see art ‘visual effects’ of magazine poetry, 48, 59 Viswanathan, Gauri, 125 vivisection, 149–50, 151, 157, 309 Voynich, Ethel, The Gadfly, 119–20 Vyver, Bertha, 293 Walker, Alfred Pickard, 216 walking narratives, 81 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 164, 171 Walton, Susan, 328 Ward, Mary Augusta, Robert Elsmere, 132–3 Ward, Mrs Humphry, 291 Ward, Mrs Wilfrid, One Poor Scruple, 107 Washington Square set and bookshop, 30–1 Wassilieff, Sophie, ‘Memoirs of a Female Nihilist’, 249

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461

Watford University Press, 391 Watson, George, 202 Watts, Cedric, 84 Watts, Charles Albert, 128 Watts, G. F., 62 Waugh, Evelyn, and American ‘new decadence’, 34–5, 42n14 Weber, Max, 138 Wedekind, Frank, 395 Wegener, Frederick, 365 Weir, David, 25–6, 29, 37 Wells, H. G., 155 The Island of Dr. Moreau, 149 on Russia, 253 Tono-Bungay, 73, 83 ‘Zoological Retrogression’, 98–9 West Central Jewish Girls’ Club, 347, 352–3 West End commercial theatre, 312–16, 313 Westminster Review, 148, 291 Westphal, Carl, 383, 385–6, 388, 391 Wharton, Edith contemporary literature on, 376–7 short fiction and women’s bodies, 362–5, 370–7 Wheatstone, Charles, 164 Whitbread, J. W., 201–2 White, Arnold, The Problems of a Great City, 75 White, J. W. Gleeson, 66 Wilde, Lady Jane, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, 207 Wilde, Oscar, 20, 21n8, 25, 27–9, 38, 53, 76, 242n4 on art criticism, 268 ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’, 32 De Profundis, 119, 142 gender and, 283–4 The Harlot’s House and Other Poems, 32 homosexuality and, 293–4 humanitarianism and, 148–9, 156, 157, 158n4 The Idler, 239–40 The Importance of Being Ernest, 76, 197 ‘Impression du Matin’, 78 on information, 175 and Ireland, 197–8, 201 Lady Windermere’s Fan, 240, 248 Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, 252 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 31–2, 82, 96–7, 99 on Russia, 245, 248, 250, 252, 256n6 Salome, 32, 185 sexology and, 395 ‘The Critic as Artist’, 46, 49, 268 ‘The Decay of Lying’, 91, 132, 133 ‘The Selfish Giant’, 197 Vera; or, The Nihilists, 250 The Woman’s World (magazine), 46–7, 47, 53, 158n4, 245, 284 and The Yellow Book (magazine), 284 Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City, 70 Willis, Chris, 338 Wilson, Edmund, 38–40, 43n18 Wiltse, Ed, 427 Winchevsky, Morris, 351 Winckelmann, Johann, 268, 394 window displays in bookshops, 28, 36

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462

index

Windsor Magazine, 325 wireless telegraphy, 163, 172 Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (WhK, ‘Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’), 393, 395 wit, 284, 310 Wolff, Charlotte, 394 Wolfrey, Julian, 427–8, 438n8 Wolfson, Susan, New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 58 ‘Woman Question, the’, 199, 323–4, 335 Woman’s World, The (magazine), 46–7, 47, 53, 158n4, 245, 284 women, 8, 283–98, 298n2 detective fiction, 430–3, 438n9 and the home, 215, 217, 226n4 in Ireland, 198–200 in Scotland, 190–1 suffering in Catholicism, 109, 117–18 suffrage and suffragettes, 132, 151, 309 travel literature, 296, 296 see also femininity; feminism; gender; ‘New Woman’; women’s bodies; women’s education; women’s periodicals; women’s rights Women Writers’ Suffrage League, 321 women’s bodies, 18, 361–3 contemporary literature, 376–8 and intelligence, 365–75, 378n6 and neurasthenia, 364–6, 378n9 works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 365–70, 378n6 works by Edith Wharton, 362–5, 370–7 women’s education, 290, 292, 321, 341n4 and their bodies, 361–3, 365, 369, 372 Women’s Penny Paper, 310–11 women’s periodicals, 17, 59–60, 321–2, 340, 341n4 generations of women writers, 323–9, 325, 327, 328, 329 Lady’s Realm and intergenerational discord, 322, 335–40, 336, 337, 339, 340 Shafts, Suffragette and ‘girls’, 329–35, 330, 333, 334, 340 women’s rights, 131, 151, 157, 190–1, 309 workers, 348–9, 351–3 Women’s Trade Union Association (WTUA), 352 woodcut engravings, 53 Woodhull, Victoria, 158n6

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Woolf, Virginia Between the Acts, 425, 437 humanitarianism and, 149 ‘Modern Fiction’, 406 Mrs Dalloway, 81 and neurasthenia, 364 A Room of One’s Own, 273 on Vernon Lee, 273 working class Catholicism, 107 working-class Evangelicalism, 134–5 working-class housing, 217, 218, 222–3 working-class Italy, 271–2 working-class secularism, 125, 127–8, 130 World War One, 156, 434 Worth, Aaron, 169, 175 Wratislaw, Theodore, 3, 29 Wylie, Elinor, 34 Xhosa culture, 420–1 X-rays, 171 Yeats, W. B. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 207–8 At the Hawk’s Well, 307 on humanitarianism, 157 and Ireland, 202, 204–5, 206–9, 211 spiritualism and, 189 and the symbolist movement, 82 ‘tragic generation’, 2, 25 on the year 1900, 25 Yellow Book, The (little magazine), 28, 33, 38, 48, 49, 66, 79 women and, 284–7, 294, 295, 298n2 yellow book binding, 33, 35, Plate 3 yoga, 309 Yonge, Charlotte, 327–8, 328 Young, G. M., 425 Young Englishwoman, The (periodical), 323 youth, 321–2, 329 Zasulich, Vera, 247 Zimmern, Helen, 275 Zola, Emile La Rêve (The Dream), 114 Lourdes, 109–10 and theatre, 240–1 Zulu culture, 408–9

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Plate 1 A selection of ten Modern Library books by decadents and new decadents dating between 1917 and 1934 (left); a selection of Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books (right). In possession of author. Photograph by author.

Plate 2 An illustration by Majeska (Henriette Stern) for Pierre Loüys (1928), Psyche, New York: Covici, Friede. In possession of author. Photograph by author. Reprinted by permission of Joan C. Covici and Joan Vollrath.

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Plate 3 A variety of ‘yellow books’ of the 1920s as issued by the Bonis, Boni and Liveright, Liveright, and Knopf. In possession of author. Photograph by author.

Plate 4 A Wallace Smith illustration for Ben Hecht (1922), Fantazius Mallare, Chicago: Covici-McGee. In possession of author. Photograph by author.

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Plate 5 Knopf books in decorated boards by Carl Van Vechten (top left, bottom left, right) and Thomas Beer (centre). In possession of author. Photograph by author.

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Plate 6 Decadent and ‘decadent modernist’ titles as issued in paperback form in the 1940s. In possession of author. Photograph by author.

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Plate 7 Bournville cottage window. Reproduced by permission of Bournville Village Trust.

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Plate 8 Bournville cottage fireplace. Reproduced by permission of Bournville Village Trust.

Plate 9 Bournville cottage bedroom. Reproduced by permission of Bournville Village Trust.

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Plate 10 Playbill, A Doll’s House and Candida, Theatre Royal Nottingham, 13 September 1897. Image courtesy of Theatre Royal and Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham.

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Plate 11 ‘Miss Maud Hoffman’, in L. Boyle (ed.) (1900), Celebrities of the Stage, London: George Newnes.

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