The Little Professor

Some Interesting Links, Only Occasionally Victorian

• Morals on one side; art on the other? The Revealer takes Edward Rothstein out to the woodshed for his article on Mel Gibson's Passion.

• Jason wants your Brit Lit II syllabi.

• Take Blue Pyramid's Book Quiz, but prepared to be baffled by the results. (First I was Love in the Time of Cholera; now I'm Compassion Fatigue. Couldn't I just be The Professor?)

• AKMA on the perils of faculty self-evaluation. As in, we tend to overestimate our skills. Just a wee bit, perhaps.

• Kieran Healy floats a high-concept horror film.

• Housekeeping: new links on the sidebar under "Victorian Studies" and "Fiction."

Clara Reeve

No, not that Clara Reeve--although I suspect we're supposed to have her in mind--but the heroine of Clara Reeve (1975), "Leonie Hargrave's" (that is, Thomas M. Disch's) neo-Victorian romance. Disch's novel strikes me as deliberately unoriginal, in the sense that it cheerfully pastiches a number of Romantic and Victorian narratives: the heroine's voice and some of her predicament owes much to Jane Eyre; the inheritance trick at the novel's core borrows from Gothic and romance tropes; there's some debased Byronism going on (indeed, the primary villain, who thinks he's Byron's illegitimate son, is named "Manfredo"); a character redeems herself at the end by heading off to Australia, as in Dickens' David Copperfield; and so forth. Clara's family tree is comically baroque. The result hovers just this side of high camp, particularly in the heroine's didactic moments and in the almost-hilarious denouement atop Mt. Vesuvius. I never quite laughed, if you know what I mean. At times, the book does make more serious points about the trickiness of memory and narrative, the ways in which individuals try to reimagine their own pasts in order to shape their public identities, but such points ultimately play second fiddle to the novel's confectionary quality.

Unlike more recent neo-Victorian novelists, Disch has no real interest in re-embodying the Victorians. He has some fun with stereotypical Victorian sexual prudery--Clara's total cluelessness about sex fuels a good deal of the plot--but there's none of the insistent materiality you'll find in Michel Faber or Sarah Waters. Similarly, while the marriage market plays a role, Disch doesn't have any interest in Victorian commodity culture or "thinginess." Disch first and foremost targets nineteenth-century literary culture, in other words, instead of its social fabric.

This Week's Acquisitions

• Deborah Alcock, Under Calvin's Spell (RTS, n.d.--possibly the 1902 ed.). Love, the Reformation and, of course, John Calvin. There's now a digitized version of Elisabeth Boyd Bayly's 1914 biography of Alcock.

• David Katz, God's Last Words (Yale, 2004). A history of Bible reading since the Reformation.

• Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire: A Novel (FSG, 2003). Several men and women try to reassemble their lives after the end of WWII.

Friday Cat Blogging

Although we can never hope to fully emulate our late lamented ancestor, we nevertheless continue to offer up pictures of our own adorable felines for your ongoing pleasure and, of course, adulation.

In this week's installment, Vicky poses between, appropriately enough, a pair of handmade "Victorian" dolls. The handmaking in question is my grandmother's, both dolls and clothing; that's also one of her watercolors on the wall above the bookcase. The doll on the left (blue silk dress) was restored by this well-known doll hospital, which also made some minor repairs to the one on the right.

Historical relativism

When I got to the end of this article on the Naomi Wolf "scandal" (?), I couldn't help groaning when I hit the "things were different then" excuse. Allow me to engage in a semi-rant here. This type of relativism--we object to these things now, but the standards were all different then--rarely seems accompanied by any awareness of historical complexity. For example. Nineteenth-century Britain may have been rife with anti-Jewish (religious) and anti-Semitic (racial) prejudices, but it was also rife with harsh attacks on those who beat up Jews or even insulted them; for that matter, many evangelicals supported the Jewish Emancipation Act. (Of course, they also wanted the Jews to convert, but you can't have everything.) Similarly, anti-Catholicism was a key "Victorian value"--it helped define Victorian conceptions of political liberty, religious freedom, even the nature of the family--but that didn't stop Anthony Trollope from painting remarkably positive portraits of Irish Catholics, or the Athenaeum from dragging an anti-Catholic novelist over the coals for whipping up hysterical sentiments. Thomas Carlyle's racial attitudes horrified a lot of his contemporaries. One could go on. Now, most of these counter-opinions would not be "ours," either: almost nobody thought Jews as a group were morally equal to Christians; even the most pro-Catholic Protestants still tended to be awfully condescending about the Roman Catholic Church as a whole; Victorian anti-racism can be a pretty awkward business. But you cannot simply say "They were different; we can let X off the hook." It may not be appropriate to bring our own moral standards to bear, but neither is it appropriate to simply erase any sign of earlier dissent. All the more so when the "earlier age" is only about twenty years ago!

The Fiend in Human

John MacLachlan Gray's The Fiend in Human: A Victorian Thriller (2003) is a neo-Victorian sensation novel, set largely in the criminal and sexual subcultures of mid-nineteenth-century London. It is most assuredly not "Dickensian," as the dustjacket flap would over-enthusiastically have it. Nor is it a "thriller," since the requisite thrills would require a better command of plot pacing, suspense and misdirection. But Gray is most in his element when it comes to the business of sensation. The novel's protagonist, Edmund Whitty, is a down-at-heels, drug-addicted scandal-sheet journalist responsible for naming the perpetrator of a series of murderous attacks against prostitutes. "Chokee Bill," Whitty's character, soon takes on a life of his own: other scandal sheets appropriate him, street balladeers take him up, and both upper- and lower-class gossips turn him into an omnipresent menace. Whitty himself cares little about the moral issues involved; he quite cheerfully gussies up scandalous narratives for profit and sees no particular problem with Chokee Bill's quasi-fictionalized status. Even when it becomes clear that the police have nabbed the wrong man, a veteran forger named William Ryan, Whitty's motives remain financial: both he and a patterer, Henry Owler, see Ryan's narrative as a profitable goldmine. It's only near the end that Whitty's behavior acquires some tincture of ethics. The better to emphasize Whitty's mixed motives, Gray fills the novel with mock-street ballads and newspaper columns, filled with heavy-breathing prose, fierce protestations of journalistic honor and authenticity, promises of scandalous revelations, and so forth. As a result, the novel becomes less a "thriller" than a study of how "thrill" itself works its way through popular culture--a meta-thriller, in a sense.

Like many neo-Victorian novelists (Michel Faber is an obvious recent example), Gray is also obsessed with Victorian commodity culture. Just as sensation has its own market value, so too do female bodies, rats, slums, drugs, and so forth. The prostitutes, for example, see themselves by and large as businesswomen, turning their bodies into a rational source of profit. This vision of Victorian culture is very much in a post-Carlylean "Gospel of Mammonism" mode, in which characters worship at the shrine of the holy guinea. As it turns out, the killer's obsession with the prostitute's potentially disease-ridden body, circulating at will through the upper echelons of masculine society, finds its ironic parallel in the infectious nature of the desire for monetary gain. We are constantly reminded that, after all, the sardonically-titled (and infinitely sub-letted) "Holy Land" slum immediately backs onto one of the most elegant neighborhoods in London; the upper class simultaneously profits off a welter of corruption and tries to maintain an artificial spatial distance.

While not a long novel, the clunky plot makes it a somewhat longer read than absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, Gray handles both language and atmosphere well, and his representation of the scandal market may be interesting to Victorianists.

What a woman's patience can endure?

I must say that this casting announcement is cause for some, shall we say, anxiety.

A golden age?

Simon Schama's call for historians to walk in the paths of "Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle" has prompted a number of thoughtful responses from The Invisible Adjunct, Timothy Burke and Kieran Healy. I'm all for more narrative history and good popular history in general, but...shouldn't a golden age have more than three golden people in it? In my more A. O. Lovejoy-ish moments, I feel vaguely skeptical about attempts to define trends by their most spectacular exemplars. It's a long fall from Gibbon (and David Hume and William Robertson) to William Alexander the Younger. It's an equally long fall from Macaulay to Charles Knight or Harriet Martineau. (Martineau has plenty of virtues, but her History of the Thirty Years' Peace doesn't really qualify as thrilling prose narrative.) J. R. Green has nearly vanished from the collective historiographical unconscious. Let's not go near Agnes Strickland* (and I'm speaking as someone who has written about Strickland). Moreover, despite being written almost entirely outside the academy, nineteenth-century scholarly history is not necessarily reader-friendly; the leading figures are usually competent enough as prose stylists, but they aren't really engaged in novelistic or, as in Carlyle's case, epic storytelling. J. A. Froude, John Lingard, E. A. Freeman, S. R. Gardiner, Connop Thirlwall, George Grote, Henry Hallam, Thomas Arnold, Henry Hart Milman, J. R. Seeley, A. P. Stanley, James Mill, William Stubbs, Archibald Alison, W. E. H. Lecky...these writers certainly commanded respect across a wide spectrum of educated readers, but they weren't attempting to compete with fiction in the literary marketplace (as Macaulay was) or even trying to make a living (as Carlyle was).** And their sense of scholarly community would have been far different, given that so many of them were either gentlemen of independent means--the novelist, essayist and occasional historian Margaret Oliphant wrote an interesting article for Blackwood's about just this point--professionals, or clergymen.*** Lower down the scale, much nineteenth-century popular history works parasitically off the backs of the major figures listed above--I say "parasitically," since there's a whole lot of plagiarism going on. No doubt much to his amazement, Hume the atheist keeps getting resurrected. At the same time, anyone who reads through the various critical reviews soon realizes that there's quite a bit of very technical work going on, especially in ecclesiastical history and classics, almost none of which would have appealed to anyone other than specialists in the same field.****

In other words, I'm not sure that the nineteenth century really possesses any more--or, for that matter, any fewer--historians with truly "popular" appeal. (And what do we mean by "popular"? Did John Q. Public enthusiastically read Carlyle's French Revolution? How many historians were in the same position as Stephen Hawking--bought to be shown off on the coffee table, not read?) Take a look, for example, at the current catalogue of the History Book Club, which features a combination of full-time academics with crossover appeal and full-time writers trying to make a living. That being said, I think that there's a real discrepancy between current academic interests and the popular demand for military history, especially WWII and the Civil War.

*--Actually, Strickland casts an interesting shadow over contemporary popular women's history. She's a kind of "bad foremother" figure for writers like Antonia Fraser.
**--Another actually: actually, it's a bit puzzling that nobody has mentioned just how many of those historians wore their political intentions on their sleeves; in fact, the major quarterlies and other literary journals often reviewed people like Macaulay or Froude according to expressly political criteria. Indeed, Stubbs argued that the study of modern history (a term with far more chronological expansiveness in his usage than in ours) was inescapably politicized. I'm not sure where I'm going with this point, other than to note that in our own age of hypersensitivity to political "agendas," it's a bit odd not to mention that nineteenth- (and eighteenth- ) century historians had similar issues.
***--While looser than our contemporary academic communal structures, this "open" community still came with all sorts of political pitfalls and no-go areas, especially if you were a clergyman-scholar.
****--As readers of this blog have noticed, I'm interested in Victorian religious fiction, especially historical novels. If you use the novelists as a barometer for "which ecclesiastical historians were popular," you'd come up with a sampling of writers who were, by and large, so far off the cutting edge as to be occupying the nearby cutting board; the only contemporary historian who appeared with any recognizable reliability was the Calvinist J. H. Merle d'Aubigne, a real evangelical shibboleth.

Job opportunities

Alternative academic career paths, anyone? (From the Guardian.) Meanwhile, Chris Bertram goes on strike.

Morbid

My most recent visit to Chris Willis' Victorian pop culture pages turned up this list of Victorian cemeteries and cemetery societies. The Sexton's Tales (warning: vaguely ominous music) identifies a number of Highgate Cemetary's, ah, current residents; the entries derive from a BBC radio series. A Victorian coffin ad, anyone? Here's an infamous moment in the history of the Victorian Turkish bath. Ancestry.com hosts a rather chatty article on Victorian death rituals; the somewhat gloomy Death Online has pictures of Victorian mourning garments. For more of the same, see this late-Victorian article from Collier's. There are examples of memorial hair art, death masks and statues here. More mourning jewelry here (may take some time to load). Another accessory: a tear bottle. Don't forget death in the workhouse (and the frequency of childhood deaths).