The Little Professor

Linking about: Dalziels' Bible Gallery

The Dalziel Brothers intended Dalziels' Bible Gallery: Illustrations from the Old Testament... (1881) to be a fine Victorian example of the picture Bible.  As it happened, it was finally issued as Biblical illustrations sans Bible.  (There's also a later edition with additional plates, called Art Pictures from the Old Testament.)  The publishers commissioned an impressive line-up of mid- and late-Victorian painters to contribute illustrations: Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, William Dyce, Arthur Boyd Houghton, William Holman Hunt, Frederick Leighton, Edward John Poynter, Anthony Frederick Sandys, Simeon Solomon, and G. F. Watts.

Links:

• The Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery collection includes a number of preparatory studies, watercolors, and engravings by Edward Burne-Jones and Simeon Solomon.
• Speaking of Birmingham, they have many more engravings in their newly-digitized Pre-Raphaelite collection (no direct link--search for "Dalziels' Bible Gallery").
• The Tate has engravings by Frederick Leighton and Edward Poynter.
• Norwich Castle Museum has an engraving by Frederick Sandys. 
• What the book looked like (scroll down for Art Pictures from the Old Testament). 
• The Dalziels discuss their problems in getting the book together.  

Perhaps there are times when a little more ego might be useful

How on earth did I forget to cite myself?!

A simple explanation for Scott's situation (with apologies to Baudrillard)

Scott feels somewhat bemused by the Washington Post's choice of words ("a blogger named Scott Eric Kaufman, who says he has a PhD in English from the University of California at Irvine").   Only "says," says Scott? However, I suspect that the WaPo may actually be on to something.  Let me explain. 

[Clears throat]

Perhaps you have yet to realize it, but UCI does not grant Ph.D.s in English.  Oh, no: all of its degrees are simulacra.  The truth (well, it would be truth, if truth existed any longer, which it doesn't, at least not at 1:33 AM, Eastern time) of the matter is in this age of global capitalism, the age of the hyperreal, your diploma is a sign without a referent.  The text inscribed on your diploma (and the very existence of the diploma as paper, a tangible object, is itself an attempt to produce the effect of reality, an effect all too necessary when it is possible to reduce one's dissertation, the labor of years, to ephemeral pixels, all weightless, unless you're viewing them on a laptop and you drop the laptop on your foot, in which case your scream of pain marks the rebellion of the somatic against the tyranny of the sign, sort of an updated Johnson vs. Bishop Berkeley thing, only with expensive electronics instead of a stone, so I really don't recommend it) conceals the non-existence of UCI as a university, as an institution apart from the shopping center across the street (and surely that connecting bridge announces what the university is all too keen to conceal, that the realms of intellect and commercialism have become fluid, indistinct, that consuming a slice of Z Pizza is no different from consuming a quarter's worth of CR100A, although the pepperoni pizza at Z Pizza is arguably tastier than excerpts from Foucault, and I recommend adding parmesan for extra zest, by which I mean the pizza and not Foucault, because parmesan does bad things to paper).  It is impossible to have a Ph.D. from UCI, but one may be had by it.

[This post brought to you by CR100B, circa 1990.  I kid because I love.]

The scholar's perennial lament

Why is it that scholarship relevant to your topic always comes out four months after the final draft of your article is due?

Hit delete

I've spent part of this evening reworking an article for its second life as chapter one of Book Two.  Besides deleting a good chunk of the introduction (hey, look, the chapter just got shorter) and upgrading some of the primary sources (whoops, it just got longer again), I also took special pleasure in knocking out a paragraph that came to be solely because a reader demanded that I cite theorists X, Y, and Z. 

ME: But X, Y, and Z illuminate nothing in this article.  Zero! Zip! Zilch!   X even read a draft of this article and noted that my arguments and his did not cross paths!  Grumble, gripe, grouse.

RESULT: A paragraph citing X, Y, and Z, followed by the observation that the phenomena observed by X, Y, and Z did not manifest themselves in the novels under discussion.  End of references to X, Y, and Z. 

As I've mentioned before, theoretical work grounded in the canon does not necessarily translate well to, say, religious pop fiction.  My novelists do not always share agendas--intellectual or formal--with Dickens or Thackeray, let alone James or Pater.   It's possible that I may mention X or Z, if not Y, elsewhere in the chapter, but their work charts a historical path that doesn't intersect at all with what these non-canonical novelists are doing.  

Idle musing of the day, academic finances edition

I wonder why our campus administration hasn't turned off faculty phone service yet.

Before you gasp in shock and horror, bear in mind that most of our campus communications are carried out by e-mail; even communications with the wide, wide world (new students seeking advice, for example) usually involve e-mail instead of the phone.  And there are precedents at much wealthier institutions--the  University of Chicago, for example.  

Just a thought. 

Signs that you may be a literary historian who works on obscure novels, #291

You squeal "Yes!!! The Internet Archive has Geraldine of Desmond!" Then you dance happily around your office.  (After that, you download it to your computer so that it can never escape you again...unlike that ILL copy, which you were unable to renew.)

Nevertheless, you express some puzzlement at finding the novel classed in "Americana," since it's written by a novelist from Limerick (who never emigrated, as far as you can tell) and published in London.

[And finally, you stop writing in second person.  Or I stop writing in second person.  Now, back to work!] 

Boredom and weariness

Research frequently involves large, unpalatable doses of boredom, exhaustion, and sheer exasperation.  No matter how exciting the topic or how invested the scholar, there's no escaping long hours of pulling source after source out of the stacks, reading books that drive you to fantasize about taking extreme measures, and straining one's eyesight while studying tracts printed in four-point fonts.  Under such circumstances, blogs prove extremely useful--because, even though you inflicted those anti-Catholic poems from the Bulwark on yourself, you can at least lament your scholarly foolishness to an audience of (one hopes) reasonably sympathetic souls. 

Obviously, the boredom factor looms much larger when you're studying works that are not "good" according to even the loosest application of the most liberal aesthetic principles.   (At best, as is the case with Newman's Loss and Gain, they may be good things of their kind--in this case, Catholic conversion fiction.  Given the choice between Newman-as-novelist and, say, Thackeray, though, Newman loses.  Come to think of it, given the choice between Newman-as-novelist  and Margaret Oliphant or Mrs. Humphry Ward, Newman loses.)  In days of yore, by which I mean the 1980s and earlier, critics working on less-than-good fiction rarely tried to "rescue" it.  Here's James Cahalan on mid-19th c. Irish historical fiction: "If the foregoing sentence has conveyed by its deliberate long-windedness any of the sheer exhaustion of trying to read most of these novels, then it has succeeded in its other task, for it is true that many of them are, in Thomas Flanagan's phrase, best lost in 'a merciful oblivion.'"¹  Or Margaret Maison on Elizabeth Agnew:

However thickly coated with the jam of "romance", the pill of theology in this type of novel is usually too unwieldy to swallow.  Miss  Agnew liked to turn her heroes into priests and her heroines into nuns, but her propaganda for the religious life was far too feeble and unconvincing to combat the strong and scandalous tradition of "wicked Jesuit" and "nunnery-tale" books in England at that time.²

Having slogged my way through Geraldine, I can certainly sympathize with Maison's assessment of Agnew's gifts (or "gifts," rather).

From a literary-historical POV, though, such virtuoso displays of sheer ennui can get in the way of thinking about the novels and their actual significance (if any).  While many of the novels Cahalan listed in his long, long sentence have vanished into the ether--if only to be resurrected on GoogleBooks--and Agnew's publications after Geraldine were not a huge success (to put it mildly), Geraldine itself sold quite well in the UK and the USA, was translated into French and German, and remained in print from the 1830s until the end of the nineteenth century.  Not as big of a success as Loss and Gain,  by any means, but Geraldine is right up there--which means that literary historians dismiss it at their peril, even if everyone else is free to ignore it. 

And yet, I've discovered that even tedious novels sometimes "animate" when you start working through their narrative strategies, theological principles, and the like.  It is, after all, possible to undo one's boredom by situating the novel in its own historical "story."   In a sense, the novels take on new life when they become characters in a scholarly plot...

[1] James M. Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1983), 68.
[2] Margaret Maison, The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), 149. 

Restraint

Because I tend to write about books that are not just under-read but positively unread, I wind up producing what I (somewhat) affectionately call "great galumphing things": articles or chapters about forty different novels, one hundred-plus sermons, and the like.  (That isn't hyperbole, either.)  It's exceedingly difficult to talk about how a novel--say, Alfred Butler's Midsummer Eve---does something different when the poor reader hasn't the slightest clue what "the same" looks like.    Nevertheless, editors frequently raise their eyebrows at great galumphing things, and I'm gloomily aware that my footnotes will probably be the first thing on the chopping block (no doubt keeping company with Anne Boleyn's and Lady Jane Grey's heads) if I manage to get a book contract.  Ergo, I'm doing my best to restrain my urge to multiply both books and footnotes in the final chapters; after all, this isn't a doctoral dissertation, where footnote multiplication is the order of the day.  In a sense, the materials are cooperating with me: while there are a substantial number of Victorian Catholic novels, an industrious graduate student probably could read them all for a dissertation, given world enough and time.  And the final chapter is all Barnaby Rudge.  (What would Andrew Davies do with Barnaby Rudge? Or to Barnaby Rudge, as the case may be? I'm not sure where he'd stick the obligatory sex scene.)

Meanwhile, the Catholic chapter is working its way towards John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain, which I'm pairing with E. C. Agnew's Geraldine.  Loss and Gain's primary antecedent is E. F. S. Harris' rather bizarre From Oxford to Rome, which cocks a direct snook at Newman's conversion, but I think Newman has Agnew's novel in his head as well.  (Newman wrote a very detailed review of Geraldine and also notes its influence in one of his letters, so it's plausible that he was thinking about it as an example of what to do and not to do.)  

Unquestioned

I always intended Book Two to be an unofficial sequel to Book One, in the sense that Book One raised questions for me--about religion and historical narrative, about historical fictions that didn't behave "properly"--that it didn't have space to answer.  But a couple of days ago,  I realized that the two books responded to the same phenomenon: nineteenth-century claims that "X does not exist" or "we've forgotten all about X."  Book One pointed out that the Victorians kept complaining that "there is no history of women" or "there ought to be a history of women, but nobody's writing it" or even "women's history is exceptionally important, so why isn't anyone writing it?"...even as histories of women kept popping up in volume form, in periodicals, in lectures at the local athenaeum, and so forth.  Now, I'm writing about authors who insisted that their peers had completely, totally, and utterly forgotten the Reformation, even as the Victorian presses were pouring out novels, histories, plays, poems, periodicals, sermons, and tracts on every possible manifestation of that  subject.  In one sense, my authors are correct: as Kenneth Stewart notes in passing, by the 19th c. various Reformers and Reformation topics had gone completely out of print (206).  Similarly, most early Victorian readers, devout or otherwise, would have known the Book of Martyrs only in abridgements.   But  it's fascinating to read an author in the 1870s complaining that "nobody ever thinks about the Reformers any more," even though by that point there was more popular and scholarly material on the topic than would fit...well, than would fit into my bookcases.   The Victorians managed to turn this "commonsense" claim about forgetfulness to all sorts of interesting polemical uses, though...