The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• James Hogg, The Three Perils of Woman (Edinburgh, 2002).  Scholarly edition of Hogg's controversial 1823 novel, set partly in the then-present day and partly in 1746.  (For the title, cf. Hogg's somewhat better-known The Three Perils of Man: War, Women, and Witchcraft.)  More about the book at the indispensable British Fiction 1800-1829, including some snark from Walter Scott. 
• John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues (NDP, 2006).  Mysterious criminal activity in Batavia, NY.  See The Arch and the Abyss for more about Gardner.  (In case you're wondering, Batavia is not far from Brockport; one of my emeritus colleagues did the scholarly apparatus for Gardner's translation of Gilgamesh.) 
• Lisa Rodensky, ed., Decadent Poetry (Penguin, 2007).  Wilde, Davidson, Johnson, "Michael Field," etc. 
• Kate Grenville, The Secret River (Canongate, 2006).  Convicts and the birth of New South Wales.
• Charles Butler, An Address to the Protestants of Great Britain and Ireland (Hansard, 1813).  Pamphlet on Catholic civil rights (or the lack thereof).  Butler was a well-known Catholic lawyer, historian, and controversialist; see the New Advent Encyclopedia for a brief biographical sketch and the National Portrait Gallery for a portrait engraving. 
• Thomas Le Mesurier, A Counter Address to the Protestants of Great Britain and Ireland: In Answer to the Address of Charles Butler, Esq (Hansard, 1813).  Critical response to the above.  Le Mesurier's Bampton Lectures are online. 
• C. J. Blomfield, Bishop of Chester, A Letter to Charles Butler, Esq. Of Lincoln's Inn in Vindication of English Protestants From His Attack on Their Sincerity in the "Book of the Roman Catholic Church," 3rd ed. (J. Mawman, 1825).  Blomfield is responding to Butler's response to Robert Southey's Book of the Church. Very brief overview of Blomfield here. 

Friday Cat Blogging

I've done my best to make my cats appreciate the value of books.  Nevertheless, Vicki is obviously ready for a night watching television.

Readable

In the comments to "Symptomatic," Marya asks, "which of your religious novels are actually fun, quirky reads, as opposed to slogs?"

"Fun" and "quirky" aren't usually the adjectives that come to mind when my religious novels are involved, but some of the authors are perfectly readable.  A few suggestions, in alphabetical order:

• Grace Aguilar.  Not a brilliant prose stylist, but her plotting and characterization are OK, and it's interesting to see a Jewish novelist trying to grab both the Protestant and the Jewish readerships at the same time.  Michael Galchinsky's recent anthology is a useful place to start.
• Elizabeth Rundle Charles.  Specializes in fictional diaries, frequently with multiple narrators; her representations of spiritual experience are often genuinely moving, and the characters are more nuanced and three-dimensional than the usual.  The best-known novels are in a series that begins with the enormously popular Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family.
• Dinah Mulock Craik.  Not as theological as the others on this list; creates some complex characters and reasonably sophisticated plots.  John Halifax, Gentleman is the novel everybody knows, but Olive is also interesting, as is A Life for a Life (which I praised with faint damns some time ago). 
• Charles Kingsley.  Kingsley's anti-Catholicism deserves the adjective "squicky" (he's far more overtly obsessed with sex than most of his contemporaries), but it's still the case that the novels themselves feature solid plotting and good dialogue.  (Granted, I have the urge to do violence to Alton Locke.) Alton Locke, Westward Ho! and The Water-Babies are the ones that have survived into the twenty-first century, but there's also Hypatia.
• Eliza Lynn Linton.  An evangelical agnostic, Linton tends to be amusingly (or at least assertively) grouchy (although her antifeminism can make modern readers similarly grouchy...). For Linton in full whack-the-church mode, try The True History of Joshua Davidson.   The Rebel of the Family, which I've not yet read, is in print.  (Do skip The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, unless you're very interested in Victorian name-dropping.)
• Anne Manning.  I think "amiable" is probably the best way of describing her style, but she's still perfectly tolerable and not always aggravatingly didactic.  She's also responsible for popularizing the diary novel.  (Brownie points for the "My Last Duchess" joke in Tasso and Leonora.)  Try The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell, Afterwards Mrs. Milton or The Household of Sir Thomas More.
• John Henry Newman.  Well, obviously, he's not primarily a novelist, and Callista--recently blogged at Siris--is not going to be for everybody; Loss and Gain, however, still goes over well (and features some amusing Victorian snark; Newman, unlike some religious novelists I can think of, actually was in the verifiable possession of a sense of humor.) 
• Charlotte Yonge.  Of the authors who tend to cross my research path, Yonge and Kingsley are the most famous today.  Start with the Heir of Redclyffe, which is still what they call a "good read."

The Horned Man

James Lasdun's slender The Horned Man (2002) melds the campus novel with the thriller.  Its first-person narrator, Lawrence, is one of those unreliable and insane figures who nowadays frequent Patrick McGrath's work, but who have their antecedents in the fiction of James and Poe.  Lawrence is an Englishman, a professor of gender studies at an imaginary college; his alienation from his American surroundings is merely an extension of his class-based alienation in England, where his mother had made an upwardly mobile marriage without successfully managing to learn the proper codes of conduct.  ("If they'd wanted to socialize with us," Lawrence's stepfather wearily says of one pointedly distant couple, "they'd have found time to invite us over in the year and a half since we had them for dinner, don't you think?" [81])  But Lawrence's psychological problems turn out to be far more sinister than mere alienation: his specialization, as it happens, merely cloaks a murderous rage against women--a rage that apparently originates from his stepsister's contemptuous (albeit perfectly understandable) rejection of his company.

This is a thriller that pushes language and social conventions to the front.  Lawrence is hyperaware of the codes that govern the relations between the sexes, and repeatedly analyzes his own desires and those of others.  Early on, he observes of this therapist that in her professional guise, "I had placed her off-limits sexually, but that reduced to the anonymity of a female human being, she was in fact quite capable of arousing desire in me after all" (6)--but this apparently rational moment of self-dissection in fact conceals his failure to distinguish his therapist from another woman of similar coloring and build.  As it happens, this misrecognition proves symptomatic of Lawrence's deeper disorder, in which he first substitutes, then violates and/or murders, one dark woman after another; while the women do not overtly resemble each other, Lawrence repeatedly notes their dark hair, their delicate yet penetrating perfumes, their mouths. 

Lawrence's insanity, as I said, begins with his brutal yet calculated dismissal by the original brunette, his stepsister Emily, on whom he had developed a passionate crush.  We see the beginnings of his real interest in gender codes in the moment of his humiliation:

Was it really possible to be so catastrophically wrong in one's reading of a situation? The discovery that it was disturbed me profoundly.  I have distrusted myself ever since.  Anytime I begin to feel comfortable with people, I immediately conjecture a parallel version of myself arousing their secret loathing. Pretty soon it gets hard to tell which version reflects reality, and I find myself splitting the difference; withdrawing into an attitude of detached neutrality.  (92-93)

Lawrence's inability to distinguish well-bred disdain from well-bred affection marks him as a social outsider, but he transfers his failure to "read" upper-class social conventions onto all relationships between men and women.  The codes of English class mutate into universalized codes of gender.  Before dealing more carefully with that point, however, notice what Lawrence also lets drop: his self-doubling, which splits an abject self from a carefully posed observer.  Lawrence writes this narrative as the analytical observer, but his self-splitting repeatedly asserts itself in the form of the mysterious Trumilcik and, eventually, in a bizarre moment of cross-dressing that takes Lawrence to a battered women's shelter.  More dangerously still, Lawrence clearly suffers from blackouts, whether it be writing a letter that he cannot remember or, indeed, "erasing" a  woman with whom he was once acquainted.  (In fact, he has inherited this woman's office.)

Lawrence represses--or, rather, fails to repress--this other self through, once again, his careful attention to sexual codes: "As a male in a position of power, one had to be vigilant over the inclination of one's eye to stray at these moments, or the tendency of one's voice to convey impulses unconnected to the ostensible matter in hand" (48).  This exaggerated self-policing turns masculine control into performance art; notice that it's not just that "modern" man must conceal all signs of erotic desire, but that he in fact must be hyper-conscious of desire.   By contrast, one of Lawrence's actually existing doubles, another English expat academic named Bruno Jackson, happily sleeps his way through the student body (and, as we discover, is almost certainly sleeping with Lawrence's now-vanished wife).  Jackson cheerfully informs a disciplinary committee that he'd hardly commits sexual harassment because "[p]ersonally, I've never needed to" (75), and this unselfconscious rejoicing in his own masculine appeal seems like a much healthier alternative to the ultra-repressive sexual correctness of Lawrence and his peers on the Sexual Harassment Committee.  Indeed, once Jackson finds himself disciplined by the committee, the students eagerly take up his defense: "No more harassment! No more abuse!/Give us the freedom to fuck who we choose!" (165) The Committee's attention to power imbalances between faculty and students here metamorphoses into the claim that such attention itself constitutes an abuse, but one can't help wondering if the students' definitions of "freedom" and "choice" are themselves especially liberating.  They are certainly just as utopian as Lawrence's dream of a perfectly ordered masculinity, or the Committee's dream of a perfectly non-exploitative relationship between a professor and a student.

Of course, the novel's final lines apparently endorse the students' position to a certain degree: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you" (193).  Out of context, this sounds like something Sir Henry Wotton would say in The Picture of Dorian Gray.  The quotation is from the  Gospel of Thomas, which both Elaine Pagels and Helmut Koester have argued is about authentic self-awareness--"one understands that one is divine, but also one understands that one is mortal." The irony is patently obvious, since in writing this narrative Lawrence has only solidified his self-deception. Moreover, Lawrence has begun to identify himself as a unicorn (he is "growing" a horn), and in medieval allegory,  Lawrence tells us via his father's historical research, the unicorn both the "ultimate pure substance" and the "ultimate toxic substance" (119).  Lawrence's obsession with social codes, his attempt to absolutely separate his natures and entirely repress one, thus leads him "naturally" to the unicorn's total, extreme unity--but how is that unity to be defined? And if we are to take the final lines seriously, then the way of the unicorn is not the way to self-knowledge, which requires man to embrace both his human and divine elements.  Or, in this quite relentlessly secular novel, man's intellectual and physical elements.

The Horned Man might have benefited from a little more length: there's little subtlety in the revelation of Lawrence's insanity (it's pretty clear from the beginning, in fact), and while it's easy enough to figure out that Lawrence is doing in women when he ought to be working on his next monograph, the psychological mechanisms involved aren't as satisfactorily worked out as they might be.  Some readers will also wonder about the sexual bleakness of this novel's landscape, stripped bare of happy relationships; for all that Bruno Jackson seems to be a positive alternative to Lawrence, it's still the case that his casual sexual relationships with whatever female students come to hand seem remarkably arid.  Perhaps, Lasdun might reply, we've simply become too obsessed with the codes of sexuality to know ourselves as both mind and body. 

Symptomatic

Some very good comments to the "Asymptomatic" post below, reminding me that I was speaking with the academic version of the "royal we."  I don't think that the English enthusiasm for Charlotte Yonge has quite crossed over to the United States, but it's true that there are a number of niche markets for nineteenth-century Christian fiction.  Inheritance Publications and Lamplighter Publishing, for example, both reprint quite a few Anglo-American Victorian novels, although the selection in both cases seems a little random (a lot of Mrs. O. F. Walton; Susan Warner; Elizabeth Prentiss; a surprising amount of E. D. E. N. Southworth; several novels about the Huguenots; the occasional A. L. O. E., Deborah Alcock, and Emma Leslie).  Moreover, a bit of noodling about on the 'net turns up a number of novels--by George Sargent, for example, or E. H. Walshe--reprinted on Christian websites or by churches.  Presumably, the rise of Google Books will make such novels far easier to acquire (that is, if the libraries doing the scanning would kindly refrain from limiting access to snippet view).   

What's difficult to ascertain, as Arnold Hunt points out, is whether or not such books have been read consistently since they were published, or have been recently rediscovered.  Moreover, if they were recently rediscovered, how were they found? If the book only went through one edition, did children read it in a Sunday School library--or did it just cease to exist? Many of these books were not bound to last (RTS and Shaw publications have a bad habit of crumbling if you look at them sideways), so it's always tempting to wonder if a book survived the decades because nobody bothered reading it.  All sorts of difficult questions here.

This Week's Acquisitions

• Narratives for the Young (Gospel Tract Depot, n.d.).  Late-Victorian anthology (really, just tracts bound together) of religious tales and parables for the young, featuring the dangers of early death, the errors of Catholics, the perils of prevarication, and so forth.
• Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (Penguin, 1993).  The quintessential campus novel.
• Georgina Harding, The Solitude of Thomas Cave: A Novel (Bloomsbury USA, 2007).  In the seventeenth century, a man bets that he can hang out on an arctic island, alone, for several months. 
• Emma Darwin, The Mathematics of Love: A Novel (Morrow, 2007).  Parallel-plot historical novel, involving letters, research, secret passions, etc.

Going mad

Ouch.  Andrew Scull reviews a new translation of Foucault's History of Madness.  (Via Butterflies and Wheels.)

Asymptomatic

Dan Green's post on fiction as "window" (or not) prompted Scott Eric Kaufman to think about the historicist critic as "literary seismologist."  And, in turn, Scott's metaphor has spurred me to think about where such cultural upheavals are actually located...

Victorian religious fiction, for example, certainly registers a number of contemporary anxieties: lapses in religious faith, the return of Catholicism and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism, theological disputes of various sorts, Christianity and capitalism, religion and femininity (and masculinity, for that matter), and so on.  Many of these religious fictions aspire to being non-fiction, in the sense that they claim to document as well as represent contemporary religious crises.  (Hence the prefaces and footnotes that readers find in novelists like Catherine Sinclair and, in the US, Julia McNair Wright.)   That is, these aren't fictions; they're "factions."  Or so they claim. 

Now, publishers, since the dawn of time (OK, of commercial publishing), have generally had a stout regard for the bottom line.  And thus, if a Victorian religious novel appeared, it's safe to say that some publisher, somewhere, thought that book would find an audience--and that that audience's coin would find its way back into the publisher's pocket.  Nevertheless, it's hard to avoid noticing that most Victorian religious novels (like most novels in general, I'd add) simply disappeared without a trace.  There are the novels whose editions multiplied like proverbial rabbits--Mrs. O. F. Walton's A Peep Behind the Scenes and Christie's Old Organ, Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer, Elizabeth Prentiss' Stepping Heavenward, Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood's The History of the Fairchild Family--and then there are all the others, which made a noise like a hoop and rolled away.  If a novel appears and nobody's interested in buying it, does it register on the critic's Richter scale?  Publishers, after all, have been known to wildly miscalculate the market for a particular theme or genre.  And didactic fiction was a business, which means that authors didn't necessarily write "from the heart": authors wrote for a perceived market, rewrote according to editorial prompts... [2]

Moreover, in the case of fiction intended for children or teenagers, it's not always clear that the adults (i.e., the people shelling out the aforementioned coins for the aforementioned novels) had more than a general sense of what might be in these books--aside, perhaps, from a general sense that the books would be wholesome, like 100% whole wheat bread.  (Buy from the Religious Tract Society! The books will be good for you! [1])  For example, it's still not clear to me why Grace Aguilar's Women of Israel became a popular Sunday School prizebook, since the book's argument--very explicitly stated in the preface!--is that one doesn't need to be Christian to be on God's good side.   Protestant book reviewers thought this was a pretty darned objectionable message--so why give the book to good little girls in Sunday School? Did it come with a surgeon general's warning label? What? It's not clear, in other words, if the book's success has more to do with the author's name recognition (Aguilar is one of the most famous Jews of the nineteenth century) than her text's relationship to contemporary ideological or theological faultlines.

Still, these are all examples of manifest content, and Scott is more interested in the subtler ways in which texts register the tremors of various intellectual, political, and cultural faults.  At times, though, I wonder if historicism doesn't obscure the extent to which even the most unabashedly popular of novels actively resist (or ignore) such tremors; it's the old problem of authorial ignorance, which I discussed several posts ago, but it may also be genre-specific.   Feminist critics have been complaining for ages that romance heroines may have new jobs, but they don't necessarily behave any differently than their more overtly "traditional" predecessors.  Along the same lines, Anne Boleyn novels "conventionally" include some sort of grumbling about female roles, disempowerment, etc., but such grumbling long predates feminism and doesn't really change once organized women's movements truly get under away.  All of the cultural tremors stay carefully on the margins--the appearance of happy gay couples in some of the most recent Anne Boleyn novels, for example.   And in my Victorian historical novels, there's some fairly sophisticated work going on with historiographical debates--but they're frequently historiographical debates of the previous century (or centuries).   (The theology tends to be rather more up-to-date.)   By contrast, detective fiction tends to be much more open to playing with whatever cultural conflicts are at hand, especially because such fiction requires the reader to believe that X is a crime, or not.  In at least some cases, the "tremor" is less in the text than in the reader's reception of the text--the ability of women to appropriate romance narratives in different ways, for example.  The latter, of course, is notoriously difficult to document.

[1] Actually, the RTS did not meet with the wholehearted approval of many Christians of the sterner sort: in some quarters, it was considered far too ecumenical.

[2] Speaking of business, and one of Ophelia Benson's recent queries, I'd note that we do have examples of authors either toning down or working up their religiosity--or irreligiosity--for the adult fiction market.  But it's true that the closest we have to an evangelical among the canonical nineteenth-century novelists is Charlotte Bronte, who in some ways is a pretty idiosyncratic Protestant; everybody else is a) a Christian of the most loosey-goosey sort (Dickens), b) politely or impolitely skeptical (Thackeray, Collins, Hardy, Gissing), c) deconverted (Eliot), d) anti-evangelical (Trollope), or e) Unitarian (Gaskell).  We no longer read the overtly religious Victorian bestsellers, like Charlotte Yonge (very High Church).   

How I might learn to stop worrying and love Google Books

Things that would make me marginally less homicidal (suicidal?) when I'm using Google Books:

1.  Items would have the correct title.  For example, in addition to the Henry Rogers botch pointed out below, we've got early issues of Dance: Screen & Stage (later Dance Magazine) listed as Patrick White's The Living and the Dead.

2.  Snippet view would take you to the text being snipped.  Instead, snippet view often takes you to text in the immediate vicinity of what you're searching for, or on the same page as what you're searching for, or several paragraphs down from what you're searching for...

3.  All items would have complete publication data.  It's not much help if I'm looking at a book with no edition, no publisher, and/or no publication date (or an incorrect publication date).

4.  Magazines and journals would have some (any!) publication data. For example, if I go to an old article from Films in Review, I get a page number without the volume, issue number, or year.  A number of magazines have been entered with only the year of initial publication.  This, when combined with the dreaded snippet view (see above), renders the search function useless: I can't see what I've pulled up (because Google insists on showing me something utterly irrelevant), and I can't ILL the article (because Google provides none of the necessary data).

UPDATE 3/22: Victor Keegan says that "[e]ven while you are reading this, Google and others are scanning libraries of books - including the Bodleian at Oxford - to make tomes that were hitherto hidden available for all to read; in the case of the millions of out-of-copyright and "orphaned" ones, where ownership is unknown, for free."  Am I the only one discovering that many  nineteenth-century texts are almost entirely confined to the aforementioned snippet view? What possible purpose does that serve, especially since the books are all out of copyright?  (I'd love to read Clifford Castle online, as opposed to blowing $145 for a copy on the verge of imminent death, but apparently I can't.  Still, I've been able to download some other rare things.) 

This Week's Acquisitions

• [Henry Rogers], The Eclipse of Faith; or, a Visit to a Religious Skeptic (Crosby, Nichols, & Co., 1853).  US reprint of the 1852 UK ed; Project Gutenberg has an e-text and Google Books Rogers' "defense" (incorrectly titled, again--this is not making Google Books any more useful).  A "factional" journal, recounting dialogues between a Christian and his skeptical friend; the text proved somewhat controversial.  Brandon posted a brief discussion of this book last year. 
  
• Andrew Reed, Edgar Nelthorpe or the Fair Maids of Taunton: A Story of the Monmouth Rebellion (John F. Shaw, n.d.).  Yet another late-Victorian historical novel about the Monmouth Rebellion, this one first published in the early 1880s.
• Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes: Or the Loving Huntsman (NYRB, 1999).  Warner's first work of fiction.  See the Sylvia Townsend Warner Archive for more information. 
  
• J. G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip (NYRB, 2005). Various Brits abroad in Singapore conspicuously fail to notice that the Japanese are coming.  Ralph J. Crane has posted a bibliography (PDF) of works by and about Farrell. 
  
• Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic (NYRB, 2001). A Welshman abroad in Bavaria conspicuously fails to notice that the Nazis are coming.  First part of "The Human Predicament."  Brief discussion of Hughes at LitWeb. 
  
• Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (Routledge, 1996). Textual scholarship and the construction of the Renaissance canon.
  
• Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature And Social Reform in the Anglo-american World (Cornell, 2006). Critical study of realism in a transatlantic context.  (There will be a Valve Book Event devoted to this next month.) 
  
• Bernard Comment, The Panorama (Reaktion, 2004). Studies the popularity of this art form in Europe and the United States. 
  
• S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power - The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660-1760 (Oxford, 1995). Emergence of Protestant strength in early modern Ireland. 
  
• Linda Wilson, Constrained by Zeal (Paternoster, 2002). Nonconformist women's religious experience during the Victorian period. 
  
• Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 (1986; Dover, 1999).  Studies the scientific and religious implications. 
• Ross A. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (Columbia, 2006).  Biography of the Victorian biologist and political activist, about whom more here.