The Little Professor

Scattered Musings

• Once again, my inability to predict course evaluations has reared its head.  This time around, my evaluations were consistently solid (with relatively little numerical variation) across all three classes, even though I had resigned myself to being summarily executed by at least one set of students.  The only thing predictable here was that we didn't "see" or "hear" the same course, even though we were all present for it (at least, I'm pretty sure I was there).  I was also rather amused to note that my students all preferred me to the actual reading material, which I suspect is a not-entirely uncommon result for faculty who teach pre-20th c. lit.
• I strongly recommend against writing a conference paper while unpacking, especially when the books you need are in a box at the bottom of a stack of four, stuck behind a row of five similar stacks...
• Over at Historiann's, there's a long, interesting (and frequently entertaining) discussion of Candidate Dinners Gone Haywire (my title, not hers), building off a post at Bardiac.  I would just add that you should probably not ask one candidate to buy food for another candidate, nor should candidates be picked up in the same car, nor should you detour to pick up your kid from school while the candidates (who, let me remind you, should not be in the same car) are in the car. 
• Katrina Gulliver's guest post at Tenured Radical on pseudonymous blogging reminded me of the flip side of pseudonymity: the limits to what you can post about and still preserve your anon/pseudonymous state.  A pseudonymous blog is terrific if you want to post about, say, hot-button political issues.  It's not so good if, like yours truly, you want to discuss anything related to your own scholarship, and prefer not to discuss politics, your personal life, etc. (well, aside from book-buying and the occasional cat).  The number of people in the universe who occupy the same research niche as I do is...limited.   How many other people on this planet write articles about the Victorian reception of the Lollards?
• Speaking of books, I think it may be symptomatic of something that I've decided to put literary criticism in the library, and moved the religion books to my new upstairs office.  I've finally made it to the point of actually shelving books, instead of just taking them out of boxes, so with any luck I'll have a picture of library-with-books for your viewing pleasure within the next few days.  In the meantime, I'm frantically attempting to push 300+ book boxes onto my colleagues, who I'm sure desperately need such things.  (One colleague took thirty boxes today, which, as he said, "didn't make a dent.")
• Er, anyone want a house?

This Week's Acquisitions

• Lynn Freed, The Servant's Quarters (Houghton Mifflin, 2009).  After WWII, young Cressida and her family come to reside at George Harding's home, with unexpected results.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Wench (Amistad, 2011).  Shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, four enslaved women try to negotiate between family ties and the possibilities of rebellion and freedom.  (Lift Bridge)
• James Hogg, A Queer Book (Edinburgh, 2007).  Scholarly edition of Hogg's quirky poetry collection.  (eBay)
• Ioan Williams, ed., Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction (Barnes & Noble, 1968).  Big anthology of Scott's literary-critical writings.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Scott Black, Of Essays and Reading in Early Modern Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).  Studies the role of the essay in shaping eighteenth-century reading practices, and their ramifications for fiction.  (eBay)
• Christine Bolus-Reichert, The Age of Eclecticism: Literature and Culture in Britain, 1815-1885 (Ohio, 2009).  Analyzes the concept of the "eclectic" as it pertains to nineteenth-century aesthetics and cultural production.  (eBay)
• Alan M. Kent, Pulp Methodism: The Lives and Literature of Silas, Joseph, and Salome Hocking, Three Cornish Novelists (Cornish Hillside, 2002).   Study of three super-prolific pop novelists, who flourished at the turn of the century.  (I own one of Joseph's novels.)  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers, 1800-1900 (Cambridge, 2006). Uses Shakespeare as a test case to examine working-class education, literary, and reading habits.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Thomas Ford Caldicott, Hannah Corcoran: An Authentic Narrative of Her Conversion from Romanism (Gould and Lincon, 1853).  Influential anti-Catholic conversion narrative by a Baptist preacher.  Corcoran's purported abduction in early 1853 set off a riot in Charlestown.   (eBay)  

What I've been doing with my time...

Needless to say, this doesn't even make a dent in the accumulated boxes.  I'm doing my best to think of this as exercise--weight-lifting, stair-climbing (the office in this house is on the second floor), and...ah...lid-throwing?

On a positive note, I did find my Norton critical edition of Vanity Fair, which is useful, seeing as how I'm teaching it right now. 

Victorian triple-decker blogging: The Monk and the Married Man, Vol. I

Julia Rattray Waddington's The Monk and the Married Man (1840) was, as Tait's Edinburgh Magazine noted, a topical novel, seizing on the "No-Popery frenzy of the hour" in order to position itself in the literary marketplace.   When it came to regarding it as a work of art, critics generally took a firmly antagonistic line--except when they were agreeing with the novel's anti-Catholic politics, in which case the novel magically became a brilliant accomplishment.  Situating The Monk and the Married Man in its literary context, the Catholic Dublin Review argued that it was one of those novels intended to "confirm prepossessions already existing, not to strengthen the wavering, or confound the gainsayer; and instead of grappling openly with the doctrines which they assail, they confine themselves to an imaginative picture of the frightful consequences to which, it is pretended, they lead."  (Having excorciated the novel on the ground of its bigotry, the reviewer proceeds to turn around and accuse the author of having "unsexed" herself.)  This is an anti-Catholic novel, but it's an anti-Catholic novel without any actual theology or theological argument; instead, it mobilizes Gothic tropes and the marriage plot in order to make its case.

Nineteenth-century British fiction frequently links toleration to modernity, in two senses: being "tolerant" in the general, personal sense, and government-sanctioned toleration in a more specific, public sense--the latter becoming increasingly important after the watershed emancipation dates of 1829 (Catholic) and 1858 (Jewish).   Novelists ran the gamut from arguing that toleration was a Good Thing to arguing that it was a sign of the coming apocalypse (and Britain's impending damnation).  Some evangelicals cheerfully described themselves as reactionaries, trying to stem a modern tide of religious indifferentists; novelists of other religious persuasions, like Anthony Trollope in The Way We Live Now, simultaneously found themselves wanting to maintain old prejudices and feeling, with considerable discomfort, that the expression of those prejudices could no longer be justified by contemporary morality.  The Monk and the Married Man wants to have its Protestant religious cake and eat it: its conventional antagonism to Roman Catholicism sits alongside some unease about "vulgar" Protestant prejudices.  If, the author asserts, Catholics regularly fall prey to the belief that "the end...would justify the means", why then, occasionally so does "the more enlightened Protestant"(I.14).  The narratator attempts to qualify her anti-Catholic stance with a display of evenhanded critique, even though the evenhandedness is an illusion (the moral error characterizes Roman Catholicism, whereas some Protestants have been known to fall into it).  One of the novel's subplots, in effect, is about the right way of going about being anti-Catholic, and the wrong way of going about evangelism.

For most of the first volume, the reader expects that the "monk" will be Reginald de Vere, an English Catholic who has spent his entire life in Italy, and the married man will be his brother Clement, a young rake brought up in England.   Partly thanks to a horrific childhood experience--he survives a massacre by French invaders in 1798--Reginald develops "devotional feeling of an unusually vivid description," accompanied by "an antipathy towards those who might chance to differ from the creed he held" (I.5-6).  Reginald's mental trauma, and the intense anti-Protestant (and anti-rationalist) prejudice he develops, suggest that the rest of the narrative will be a kind of post-Napoleonic hangover; indeed, the dangerous Louis Fitzgerald, a Franciscan, renews his career in Italy because his French monastery became "a prey to the incendiary" (I.10).  Once the Napoleonic empire collapses, the Church sees an opportunity and begins "[i]nnumerable intrigues" (I.17).   Thus, the sweep of Napoleonic infidelity (as the novel understands it) produces a corresponding backlash from its opposite number, Roman Catholic bigotry.  By contrast, England's Protestant culture remains stable in this period of historical chaos.  Thus, Reginald's residual Englishness raises questions about his religious and political allegiances: will he side with his Continental heritage, which has been figured in terms of religious and irreligious extremism, or will he opt for a conservative, Protestant Englishness? Of course, the English de Veres aren't Protestant, either.  Instead, like Clement, they maintain their Catholicism because it's the "family faith" (I.175)--a near-infidelity that further links the association between the French Revolution and Roman Catholicism.  Except for Reginald, the novel's Roman Catholics are, by and large, "nominal" in their religious sympathies.  When the unpleasant Clement (an allusion to Father Clement?) becomes a monk, it's because the beautiful and symbolically-named Helen Templar rejects him; similarly, Reginald's cousin Agnese opts to take vows because Reginald apparently has no romantic interest in her.   Vowed celibacy winds up being a sulky substitute for marital sexuality.  (Notably, most of the novel's Catholic characters actually disapprove of monastic vocations.)

By the end of the first volume, the novel has swapped our expectations, with Clement becoming the monk and Reginald--who must succeed Clement as the heir--apparently on track to be the married man, although no suitable wife is at yet on the horizon.  As the heir to Ravenswood (a name with distinctly problematic echoes from Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor), Reginald is also saddled with its "desecrated chapel" (I.119), the sight of which "offered too striking a memorial of the galling degradation cast on his race and creed, to fail of rivetting a mind like his" (I.119-20).  Later Catholic novelists would appropriate the figure of the ruined chapel to allegorize the rebirth of Catholicism in modern Britain; here, though, the ruin simultaneously invokes the spectre of Protestant violence (in the past), the disempowerment of Roman Catholics (in the present), and, with the arrival of the eventual heir, the threat of Catholic renewal (in the future).   What, then, will Reginald do?

Meanwhile, in the midst of chiding her stock anti-Catholic characters (slinky priests, deceptive abbots, etc.), the narrator pauses to rebuke the sort of "female controversialist" who argues with excessive "zeal and vehemence," making little impact other than annoyance.  Nor does the narrator approve of the Dissenter--the Dissenters, she remarks, "had not stricken hands" yet with the Catholics (I.116)--who pronounces that "the days of Bloody Mary" will return if Catholics are not firmly suppressed (I.116).  The first, gendered argument invokes standard complaints about women being too emotional to engage in theological disputes (frequently by other women engaging in theological disputes...); the second denounces the ahistorical panics which read history in terms of repetition instead of potential change.  And yet, the narrator does fear the effect of Catholicism's resurgence on English soil, a fear made more pointed by the novel's setting in pre-Emancipation England--certain approaches to attacking Catholics are being ruled out, while others, perhaps, will be ruled in. 

 

 

Ice-breaking

When I teach nineteenth-century literature courses, I like to bring in examples of different kinds of publications--expensive to cheap--so that students get some idea of how the books look and feel.  It's also a good way of asking students to think about the kinds of evidence or information you can derive from a book.  This time, I'm somewhat constrained by the fact that most of my books are in boxes (arrrgh), but I was able to dig out a few:

Here we have: 1) a second edition of H. H. Milman's The Fall of Jerusalem (calf, gilt, marbling); 2) a Religious Tract Society novel; and 3) one of the nineteenth century's most popular tracts, Legh Richmond's The Dairyman's Daughter.  In addition to the noticeable differences in binding and paper quality--the Milman book, published in 1825, has bright white pages, unlike the other two--there are things to notice about inscriptions, catalogs, engravings, and the like. 

This Week's Acquisitions

(Huh.  All those bookcases, and only one new book...)

• Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman (Cambridge, 2009).  Shockingly, it's a companion to John Henry Newman (mostly the theology). 

Stack 'em

Library stacks ahoy:

They're not bolted together or to the wall yet, and obviously the shelves haven't all gone in, but you get the general idea.  As you can see, the stacks go three across + a fourth bookcase that "caps" the end (instead of just having a blank space where the bookcases come together).  That fourth bookcase is deeper than the ones used to make the stacks, so that it carries its own weight.  The cap idea was inspired by arrangements at the Strand. 

Although you can't see them in the photo, there are track lights running between each row of bookcases. 

Numbers, Impending Semester Edition

Number of syllabi completed for Monday: 1/2

Number of students in Brit Lit II: 33

Number of conference papers that need to be finished by 2/17: 1

Number of times I have told myself that a certain article will be finished this semester: 9201

Number of books left on the department's free book table this afternoon: about 23

Number of days I have been living in House the Sequel with no furniture: 30 (give or take some nights spent at House the Original, plus one week off for MLA)

Number of hours spent cleaning House the Original today: 4

Number of times I muttered dire imprecations about aching muscles: 4392

Number of hours until the moving company arrives: 14

Number of book boxes I moved from House the Original to House the Sequel: 190

Number of people asking me how I could move all those books in a Ford Focus: 2

Number of book boxes remaining: 118

Number of months it took to pack the boxes: 3

Number of bookcases sitting in my family room: 16

Number of bookcases in the finished library: 32

Number of bookcases that will be relocated elsewhere in the house: 8

Number of sixteen-pound cats convinced that they could successfully hide behind the toaster: 1

 

 

 

 

Got readers?

One of the things that interests me about Victorian religious fiction (and other popular religious prose) is that always thorny problem known as "the audience."  As I (foot)note in the introduction to Book Two, it's easy enough to identify which texts were frequently purchased and distributed; once you get past Really Big Sellers like Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere, though, it's not so easy to figure out who actually read the texts in question.   Sometimes, it's not altogether clear why a given book became so popular--my favorite example being Grace Aguilar's The Women of Israel, which keeps cropping up as a Sunday School prizebook (and sometimes gets free advertising *), even though the introduction explicitly argues that the book is intended to counteract the effects of Christian didactic works and insists that Jewish women "need not Christianity to teach us our mission..." (Was there context? Were little Protestant girls told not to read the introduction? Did nobody read the introduction?) Aside from my desire to entertain my readers by liveblogging some of the less competent examples of Victorian religious fiction, I keep reading these texts because the available scholarship hasn't yet come to a consensus on what was "major" or "minor" at the time.  What books did everyone read, or at least recognize (in much the same way that most people know something about Left Behind, even if they've never looked into a volume)? Which books were regularly used to proselytize? What about Catholic fiction, which scholars have just barely touched? And so forth.  (One of the nice things about digitization has been that it's much easier to search old memoirs and published correspondence for reference to such things.)

Of course, even those these novels appear to be omnipresent, a substantial contingent of readers disliked them intensely; the "yikes!" response from many secular (and religious, for that matter) twenty-first century readers isn't necessarily anachronistic.  George Eliot famously takes a whack at some of them in "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," but the anti-religious novel position is hardly an elitist one.  Caroline Fry, who admits to reading Father Clement, tells her correspondent that she is impressed by neither the "efficacy" nor the "general tendency" of these works.  A reviewer in the liberal Catholic journal The Rambler puts his or her finger on the central problem: "Stories in which the literary frame-work is prominently subservient to the inculcation of theological doctrine are rarely tolerable, either as stories or as theology."  This last point was a serious issue, precisely because many Christians (of all stripes) criticized the moral tendencies of contemporary fiction and called for Doctrinal Correctness, even as they frequently found themselves concluding that Doctrinal Correctness as such made for bad art.  There's an extremely lively debate to be found in the religious periodicals concerning the nature of religious fiction as literature; it's not as though nobody noticed that Truth without Fiction, and Religion without Disguise was a dreadful novel.  But then again, quite a lot of people thought that Geraldine was a reasonably good novel...

 

*--“But, mamma,” said Belle, “she is a Christian, I know from good authority, and I am prepared to love her because I love the Jewish nation,--of which she is a beautiful representative,--and have loved them ever since I read Grace Aguillar’s [sic] ‘Women of Israel.’”  C. A. O., Into the Light; Or, the Jewess (1867; Boston: Lee and Shepard, n.d.), 256. 

This Week's Acquisitions

(Après MLA, le déluge.)

• Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo, eds., Michael Field, The Poet (Broadview, 2009).  Anthology of works by the late-Victorian poets known as "Michael Field"--in reality, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper.  (MLA)
• Cynric R. Williams, Hamel, the Obeah Man, ed. Candace Ward and Tim Watson (Broadview, 2010).  Novel about, among other things, a slave rebellion in Jamaica.  (MLA)
• Margaret Oliphant, Kirsteen: The Story of a Scotch Family Seventy Years Ago, ed. Anne M. Scriven (ASLS, 2010).  First scholarly edition of one of Oliphant's few historical novels, this one following a young Scottish woman's successful decision to reject her father's demands, opting instead to make a life and career for herself in London.  (MLA)
• Carol Margaret Davison, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).  The presence of and responses to Judaism in nineteenth-century Gothic.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• April London, Literary History Writing, 1770-1820 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  Emergence of literary history as a discipline and critical practice. (MLA)
• Juliet Shields, Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745-1820 (Cambridge, 2010).  Problems of national identity after the Union.  (MLA)
• Richard J. Hill, Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels (Ashgate, 2010).  A history of the nineteenth-century illustrations.  (MLA)
• Rebecca Styler, Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate, 2010). Tracks women's popular theology across autobiography, fiction, poetry, and the like.  (MLA)
• Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot's Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 2010).  Development of Eliot's philosophy, scholarship, etc. and its influence on the novels.  (MLA)
• Kate Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  Relates the ascendancy of neo-Victorian historical fiction to contemporary intellectual trends.  (MLA)
• Mary Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook of the Gothic (NYU, 2009).  What it says in the title--a reference work on Gothic literature from the beginnings to the present. (MLA)
• Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale, 2010).  Just what was it like to live in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century English homes? (MLA)