The Little Professor

This Week's Acquisitions

• Ben Wilson, The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain: 1789-1837 (Penguin, 2007).  How the Victorians forgot to have fun, basically. 

Wishlist list

To commemorate a somewhat unfortunate occasion--namely, my Amazon wishlist topping the 1K mark.  (For the record, to reassure those experiencing a sudden spasm of anxiety about my checkbook: I use the wishlist to keep track of books that might come in handy someday, not necessarily books I intend to buy in the immediate or even distant future.  Sorry, Amazon.)

• Most expensive book: Romanticism and Politics, 1789-1832 ($1070).  I'm guessing that this is a multivolume set.
• Cheapest book: John Banville, The Newton Letter ($9.31 after discount). 
  
• Books available used for .01: Amanda Prantera, Letter to Lorenzo;  Jennifer Egan, The Invisible Circus: A Novel; Penelope Lively, Heat Wave: A Novel; Elizabeth Cook, Achilles: A Novel.
  
• Most consistently expensive university press: Oxford.
• Books that I really wish somebody would send me to review: Patrick R. O'Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture;  Maureen Moran, Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature; Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (change of religious pace there).    
• Books that I might actually use in a classroom at some point: Thomas J. Collins, Anthology of Victorian Prose; Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction.   
• Potentially oddest novel: Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite. (I mean--Julia Ward Howe?!)
• Novel with strangest title: Richard Marsh, The Joss: A Reversion.
• Contemporary novel I'm most looking forward to reading: Jim Crace, The Pesthouse. 
• Only graphic novel on the list: Will Eisner, Fagin the Jew. 
• Books out of my field that I'd love to read: John N. King, Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' and Early Modern Print Culture; Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr; Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation;  Helen L. Parish, Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of the Medieval Church; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi; David Cressy, Bonfires & Bells.    
• Books in my field that I really should read ASAP (er, of many): K. D. M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion; Michaela Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible: Representation And Belief in Mid-victorian Britain; Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past 1800-1953; Graham Law, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. 
  
• Number of books that I've read, but keep on the list to remind myself that I should look at them again (or buy them) at some point: 25
  
• Book I heard the authors discuss while the manuscript was still gestating: Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics 1819-1869 (during a Nineteenth-Century Workshop meeting at the University of Chicago).
• Books with least illuminating Amazon reviews: William J. Astore, Observing God: Thomas Dick, Evangelicalism, and Popular Science in Victorian Britain and America ("An irreverant excuse for a publication that assumes WAY too much and poorly connects the elements of science, art and religion that would leave the spirit of Thomas Dick himself mourning in his grave"); Jeff Nunokawa, Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire ("Indeed, discipline appears to be the missing concept in Nunokawa's self-impressed, accordion-like unfolding of a screen that has precious little substance after one gets past the fanfare of the author's delight at his own meditations"); Peter White, Thomas Huxley: Making the 'Man of Science' ("This book is less of a pleasure read as it is an academic History of Science read").
• Book in which (apparently) I'm in the acknowledgments: Norman W. Jones, Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative (so Professor Jones tells me). 
• Books written by people with whom I went to graduate school: Janine Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel; Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property.   
• Book written by another member of the Victorian Studies Reading Group of Upstate New York: Daniel Hack, Material Interests of the Victorian Novel.   

This Week's Acquisitions

• M. G. Murray, The Vicar of St. Margaret's: Prize Story on the Present-Day Conflict with Sacerdotalism (RTS, 1904).  Reprint of this 1899 novel about the dangers of both Roman and Anglo-Catholicism. 
• Alice Lang, From Prison to Paradise: A Story of English Peasant Life in 1557 (RTS).  Looks like the early twentieth-century reprint of this 1890 historical novel about the Marian persecutions.
• Jane Bowles, My Sister's Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles (FSG, 2005).  Short fiction and a novella.  There's a brief overview of Bowles' life at the Paul Bowles site. 
• Frances Hwang, Transparency: Stories (Back Bay, 2007).  Short fiction about the lives of Asian immigrants in the US. 
• Richard Hughes, The Wooden Shepherdess (NYRB, 2000). Part II of "The Human Predicament"; includes what exists of Part III. 
• Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder: and Other Stories (Nan A. Talese, 2006).  Short fiction about multiple generations of a Canadian family.
• Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture (Princeton, 2006).  Part I of this massive global history of the novel. 
• Leslie Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters (Hambledon, 2003).  Literary biography of the man now best known for the bad writing contest...
• William Palmer, A Narrative of Events Connected with the Publication of the Tracts for the Times, with Reflections on Existing Tendencies to Romanism, and on the Present Duties and Prospects of Members of the Church (Sparks, 1843).  A founding participant in the Oxford Movement backpedals rapidly.  There's an online edition at Project Canterbury. 

Clearly, I have something to aspire to

A Victorian visitor to the home of John Murphy, the Bishop of Cork:

The Roman Catholic bishop of Cork has one of the most interesting collections I have anywhere seen.  This learned and industrious man has turned his whole house into a library.  Not only his sitting rooms and dining rooms, but even in his bedroom every spare place is filled with books.  His attendants and even his menial servants sleep in little libraries.  The walls of his staircases and the corridors of his rooms are filled with books, up to the very garrets....

--qtd. in Nigel Yates, The Religious Condition of Ireland 1770-1850 (OUP, 2006), 106.   

Lulugoogle

Has anyone used Lulu to print out a book downloaded from Google Books? (Not to sell--I just want to make a bound copy for myself.)  What sort of tweaking, if any, did you need to do to the PDF?

A Natural History

Keith Oatley's A Natural History (1998) performs radical surgery on George Eliot's Middlemarch.  Oatley appropriates and inflates Eliot's use of a cholera outbreak into one of his novel's major conflicts, while shearing off or collapsing Eliot's multiple plots.  A Natural History narrates the courtship, marriage, and struggles of Marian Brooks and Dr. John Leggate, who live in the town of Middlethorpe; Marian is an occasional writer and tentatively aspiring pianist (there are some echoes of Daniel Deronda here), and Leggate is an ambitious physician-scientist obsessed with discovering the cause of cholera.  After a number of unpleasantnesses brought on by a cholera epidemic in 1849--including the proto-muckraking journalism of Marian's rejected suitor, Warrinder--the couple emigrate to Canada, where Leggate becomes a respected professional and Marian a successful music teacher.

Both protagonists are recognizable composites of Middlemarch characters, and their stories similarly borrow from the earlier novel's plots.  Marian yokes together Dorothea Brooke (the last name, the utopianism about marriage), Rosamond Vincy (various marital crises, her education in a finishing school, the piano-playing), and Eliot herself (the first name, the lapsed religious faith, the writing talent, her vexed relationship with her father).  Leggate, meanwhile, marries Lydgate (the name, the profession, the dedication to science, the romance with an actress) and Casaubon (his difficulties with publication).  Marian's brother William strongly resembles Fred Vincy, and her friend Caroline fills in for Dorothea's sister Celia; similarly, Leggate's friend Halliwell, an engineer, is akin to Mr. Farebrother.  As for the stories, Leggate's cholera research combines elements of both Casaubon's and Lydgate's thwarted projects--although Leggate eventually identifies the cause of cholera, he is pipped to the post by John Snow, its historical discoverer--and the scandal surrounding his assistance to prostitutes during the outbreak looks back to Lydgate's misfired connection to Bulstrode.  Marian's own longing for vocation and her attempt to theorize the role of "friendship" in marriage derive primarily from Dorothea's plot.

It might be better to think of A Natural History as a corrective to Middlemarch, rather than a revision of it--although, obviously, the former implies the latter.  By "corrective," I simply mean that A Natural History tries to straighten out all of the kinks in Middlemarch's various romances and related plotlines.  As I noted the other day to some students in my upper-divison novel course, none of the romance plots in Eliot's novel quite work; the final pairings are (mostly) more or less happy ones, but Eliot deliberately makes them all a shade less than ideal.  (Is the often petty, sulky Ladislaw really more perfect for Dorothea than Sir James or Casaubon? Does Fred really deserve Mary more than Mr. Farebrother does?)   Similarly, Eliot's Lydgate winds up wealthy but nevertheless a failure, implicitly "killed" by his wife's unrelenting materialism and egotism.  (As Eliot's narrator reports, "[h]e once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains" ["Finale"].)  In A Natural History, by contrast, both Marian and Leggate finally achieve personal and professional success through a process of trial-and-error: Marian learns that "[i]t's not so much a matter of starting with friendship, or imagining ourselves complete in ourselves, as coming through the longings to friendship" (392), while Leggate discovers scientific sampling methods and microscopy techniques along with the cholera.  The Leggates' abrupt departure for Canada, which involves remarkably little angst--perhaps because, as Marian's aunt says, "People visit America now for the fun of it" (363)--draws on the emigration topos familiar from Victorian novels like Mary Barton or David Copperfield, in which the colonies offer a free space for experimentation and social rebirth, further suggests that the couple possibly represents a new historical type.  Their joint growth, which embodies an implicitly post-Victorian form of marriage, also suggests the novel's relative optimism about modernization; unlike Middlemarch, which at times has a Walter Scott-ian nostalgia for the traditions dislodged by the coming of, say, the railway, A Natural History unambiguously interprets scientific progress as a social and moral good.  (Is there such a thing as Whig historical fiction?) In fact, the ending, which couples Darwin and Malthus, verges on environmental utopianism (albeit of a suitably dismal sort): "How the human race can stop multiplying, before we all reproduce ourselves out of existence, so the only creatures to survive will be ones that are too small to be seen" (396).  For Marian, Darwin effectively ends religious narratives of human development, and substitutes instead a "new story," in which "we're making our way up from something worse" (395).

I fear that I have a few caveats about the novel's overall success.  To begin with, it's not always the case that a happy ending is a successful ending.  Eliot's thwarted characters suggest a much tougher view of historical process than Oatley possesses:  Casaubon's scholarship is anachronistic; Lydgate's will prove similarly so (but is first thwarted by provincial culture itself); Dorothea's vocation cannot be realized in the circumstances of 1830s England.   Leggate's success, complete with vindication by his enemies in Middlethorpe, is more wish-fulfillment than anything else--a fairy-tale ending, not a realistic one.  More seriously, the Oatley of 1998 is not yet an entirely successful prose stylist.  The characters do not speak in different "voices," and they all think in comma splices (in lieu of a more ambitious form of stream-of-consciousness narrative).  I also found the various ups-and-downs of the Leggate marriage somewhat abruptly handled--it's not always clear why the characters are fighting, or what motivates their behavior more generally--and religious convictions do not seem to be Oatley's forte.  Then again, Oatley does effectively and unobtrusively work in stray wisps of description or dialogue from Eliot's novel, and there is an interesting (albeit implicit) debate about the relationship between scientific observation and different forms of literary style.  The overall result can be frustrating, to be honest, but Victorianists at least will be interested.