Writing and Victorianism

J.B. Bullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317888468
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Writing and Victorianism asks the fundamental question 'what is Victorianism?' and offers a number of answers taken from methods and approaches which have been developed over the last ten years. This collection of essays, written by both new and established scholars from Britain and the U.S.A, develops many of the themes of nineteenth-century studies which have lately come to the fore, touching upon issues such as drugs, class, power and gender. Some essays reflect the interaction of word and image in the nineteenth-century, and the notion of the city as spectacle; others look at Victorian science finding a connection between writing and the growth of psychology and psychiatry on the one hand and with the power of scientific materialism on the other.

As well as key figures such as Dickens, Tennyson and Wilde, a host of new names are introduced including working-class writers attempting to define themselves and writers in the Periodical press who, once anonymous, exercised a great influence over Victorian politics, taste, and social ideals. From these observations there emerges a need for self-definition in Victorian writing. History, ancestry, and the past all play their part in figuring the present in the nineteenth-century, and many of these studies foreground the problem of literary, social, and psychological identity.

1
Transition and tradition: the preoccupation with ancestry in Victorian writing

Sophie Gilmartin

In opening a consideration of the relationship between ancestry and narrative in the Victorian period, I will begin with Victoria herself, and the story of her discovering her genealogical tree and how it would determine her destiny. The eleven-year-old princess had finished her early lessons on 11 March 1830, when she

opened Howlett’s Tables of the Kings and Queens of England, to begin her history lesson with Lehzen (her governess). She found to her surprise that an extra page had been slipped into the book. ‘I never saw that before’, she exclaimed. ‘No, Princess’, said Lehzen. ‘It was not thought necessary that you should.’ Victoria studied the genealogical table. So many possible heirs to the throne but each one with the date of death written after the name, until she came to the names of her two uncles, George and William, and then her own. She drew the deduction. ‘I am nearer to the throne than I thought.’ Then she burst into tears. After the ‘little storm’ had subsided she pointed out to her dear Lehzen that whereas many children might boast of the splendour they would not realize the difficulties. Lifting up the forefinger of her right hand she spoke the famous words: ‘I will be good.’¹

The genealogy that the Princess Victoria studies in this scene is both a record of her country’s past (it is an ‘extra page’ added to a history book of English succession) and a prophecy of her individual destiny (she may become queen). In her case, national and personal history coincide, revealed through the record of her ancestry. This genealogical record located the young princess in relation to the past and future: she surveys the past record of family history and responds with the future tense, ‘I will be good’.

This double-vision of looking to the past to see the future, which the young Victoria enacts in this famous story, is not limited to royalty but is typical of the era to which the princess gave her name. As is commonly acknowledged, the Victorians were fascinated by the past, whether this fascination manifested itself in Gothic Revival architecture, Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry, the partly or wholly invented pasts of Walter Scott’s novels or the re-enactment of knightly jousting and chivalry in a spectacle such as the Eglinton tournament. Indeed, ‘chivalry’ was not just a thing of the past to the Victorians: as David Lowenthal writes, the nineteenth century saw ‘the expansion of the knighthood from 350 at the start of Victoria’s reign to nearly 2,000 at the end’.² While delving in the past, Victorian Britons were also intensely conscious that their age was one of ‘progress’, change and transition to an unknown future. This awareness of transition, whether on the part of the individual, the community or the nation, gave to the period a Janus-faced gaze: while the rapid advances in industry, science and social reform naturally implied a look to the future, there was a correspondent need at this time to look to the past, back to some point of origin, whether that was real or imagined. In this period of heady change and reform, a coherent narrative of origins, whether familial or national, imparted a reassuring sense of stability - of ‘roots’ or a solid foundation. If the Victorians partly defined themselves and their age as being in transition, they also defined themselves by their traditions, and particularly by the traditions surrounding ancestry and the family pedigree.

This chapter will explore some of the narratological, nationalist, social and evolutionary issues which cluster around the representation of the past in the family tree or pedigree. On the level of narrative, the double-vision discussed above, in which a focus on the past results in a look to the future, forms a type of narrative arc of past/present/future analogous to the beginning/middle/end of a story. Just as Princess Victoria is said to have wept at the challenging and difficult life-story mapped out for her in the genealogical tree, so much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature is populated with characters whose stories are at least partly determined by their family tree. In numerous novels of these periods it is the mystery which surrounds the ancestry of the orphaned or foundling protagonist which drives the narrative.³ At the fin de siecle Oscar Wilde parodied literature’s preoccupation with ancestry and mysterious birth in his play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Jack, attempting to gain the hand of Gwendolen, wrestles with the difficult question of his mysterious origins before the very difficult Lady Bracknell (Gwendolen’s mother). He explains that as a baby he was found ‘in an ordinary hand-bag in the cloak-room at Victoria Station’. Lady Bracknell is quick in her advice that he ‘acquire some relations as soon as possible, and to make a definite effort to produce at least one parent, of either sex, before the season is quite over’. Jack’s future as Gwendolen’s husband depends upon his ancestry, which must be respectable and of the appropriate social class for the son-in-law of Lady Bracknell. Finally, Jack’s ancestry is discovered; he is found to be the heir to an estate, and is ecstatic to find that his pedigree is not that of a hand-bag, and that Gwendolen will not have to ‘marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel’.⁴

Wilde’s parody of the plot of mysterious origins and of undiscovered ancestry in The Importance of Being Earnest serves to defamiliarize and so throw into relief a type of plot which is often so familiar to the reader as to go unnoticed and unquestioned. Indeed, so permeated is Victorian writing with the concerns of ancestry that to the reader these preoccupations may become invisible precisely because they are so common and pervasive. Particularly in the novel, for instance, the intricacies of the family tree become the crises of plot and subplot; problems of inheritance, younger brothers, arranged marriage, misalliance, adoption, illegitimacy, the need for an heir - these are the catalysts of so many Victorian narratives and they are centred in the family tree and the will to keep the family line going.

Writing of Hardy’s later novels, Edward Said proposes that it was perhaps Hardy’s ‘observation’ that fiction and genealogy are bound up in one another that caused him to turn away from the novel at the end of the century. Said sees Hardy’s recognition of the relationship between fiction and genealogy as an acknowledgement that

if fiction is to be narrative at all, it must necessarily be linked to and coeval with the very process of life itself; and furthermore, if narrative is to be mimetic as well as productive, it also must be able to repeat as well as record the ‘fathering-forth’, the ‘over and overings’ (the phrases are Gerard Manley Hopkins’s) of human life, the essence and image of which are biological self-perpetuation and unfolding genealogy based on the procreative urge, marriage and family.⁵

Mikhail Bakhtin, also, views genealogy as essential to what he calls the ‘biographical novel’ - a type which he describes in his introductory history of the development of the genre as immediately preceding the Bildungsroman and the major forms of nineteenth-century fiction. Genealogy or ‘generations’ place the single life-span within the scale of history, and this Bakhtin sees as crucial to the nineteenth-century novel:

Biographical time as real time cannot but be included (participate) in the longer process of historical, but embryonically historical, time. Biographical life is impossible outside a larger epoch, which goes beyond the limits of a single life-span, whose duration is represented primarily by generations.⁶

For Said, it is the repetition (the ‘over and overings’) demanded by the genealogical imperative which are crucial to fiction, and for Bakhtin it is particularly the juxtaposition of different time-scales.

Both repetition and scale are central to Thomas Hardy’s writing, and a glance at two of his poems, ‘The Pedigree’ and ‘At Castle Boterel’, may serve to clarify some of the reasons why genealogy is such an intense preoccupation in nineteenth-century writing, involved with contemporary anxieties and debates over free will and determinism, and over some of the disturbing conclusions drawn from new discoveries in geology and evolutionary theory -a few of the issues which will impinge upon my discussion of ancestry in Victorian writing. At the centre of Hardy’s poem ‘The Pedigree’ is the fear of genealogical repetition. A figure is seen at night studying his family tree: ‘I bent in the deep of night / Over a pedigree the chronicler gave / As mine’, the poem begins. In the second stanza and those that follow the pedigree becomes increasingly disturbing to the man:

II

So, scanning my sire-sown tree,

And the hieroglyphs of this spouse tied to that,

With offspring mapped below in lineage,

Till the tangles troubled me,

The branches seemed to twist into a seared and cynic face

Which winked and tokened towards the window like a Mage

Enchanting me to gaze again thereat.

III

It was a mirror now,

And in it a long perspective I could trace

Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each

All with the kindred look,

Whose names had since been inked down in their place

On the recorder’s book,

Generation and generation of my mien, and build, and brow.

IV

And then did I divine

That every heave and coil and move I made
Within my brain, and in my mood and speech,

Was in the glass portrayed

As long forestalled by their so making it;

The first of them, the primest fuglemen of my line,

Being fogged in far antiqueness past surmise and reason’s reach.

V

Said I then, sunk in tone,

‘I am merest mimicker and counterfeit! -

Though thinking, I am I,

And what I do I do myself alone.’⁷

The poem offers no answer to the quandary suggested by these last quoted lines: it presents an important opposition in nineteenth-century thought about ancestry: are we merely ‘mimickers’, determined by our past, or can we act with free will and self-determination, free of the past (‘I am I and what I do I do myself alone’)? During the French Revolution, French citizens were also anxious to be ‘free of the past’ - so much so that they created a new calendar, naming the first year of their ‘New Era’ the ‘First Year of the Republic’, thereby erasing the past as represented by the Gregorian calendar and the dynastic history of their nation. For many nineteenth-century Britons this new French regime, self-fashioned, a tabula rasa, was written over with the horrors of the guillotine, mob violence, and particularly regicide. After the French Revolution, then, dynastic history and the traceable lines of genealogy were more than ever representative of continuity and national stability and even more attractive to nineteenth-century Britons than they had been to those of the eighteenth century. Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (1837) sentimentally portrays the family life of Louis XVI, and regards the execution of the king and queen as a blow against both dynastic and family history. Carlyle’s portrayal of Louis and Marie Antoinette as loving parents and a close family unit (especially in his redacted account of the family parting before the king’s execution) is interesting because it brings together private moments of family history and public, dynastic history. Here, family history also provides a model of stable hierarchical relations: Louis is a father, and at the head of his family. The fact that he is also a king, and ‘father’ to his country, underlines the importance of the ‘natural’ order of patriarchy in both familial and dynastic history to the continuity and stability of the nation - this latter view being crucial to the conservative population of nineteenth-century Britain.

In the same year that Carlyle’s The French Revolution was published, Victoria, the great matriarch of nineteenth-century Britain, came to the throne. While Victoria was a strong ruler, her matriarchy presented little challenge to the patriarchal order of Victorian society. After her marriage with Albert, the royal couple and their growing family presented to the public an image of the family unit in comfortable, close domesticity, with Albert at the head. Indeed their family life agreed well with the growing emphasis in the nineteenth century on the bourgeois family unit. The intrigues, illegitimacies and infidelities of eighteenth-century aristocracy were now vilified, and replaced even at the throne with what would come to be known as ‘Victorian’ family values, those values which were supposed to uphold the home as a place of refuge and affection, and of the sexual fidelity which would ensure that the inheriting children were legitimate. Even after Albert’s death in 1861, the prince consort was still a powerful patriarchal presence - present in spirit as is clear from Victoria’s almost obsessive widowhood and seclusion, and iconically present in paintings and, later, photographs which almost always include a bust or painting of Albert at the side of the queen in her widow’s weeds. In a century which was taken up with debates over the Matrimonial Causes Act (passed in 1857) and the Married W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Transition and tradition: the preoccupation with ancestry in Victorian writing
• 2 The major silence: autobiographies of working women in the nineteenth century
• 3 Writing, cultural production, and the periodical press in the nineteenth century
• 4 Engendering vision in the Victorian male poet
• 5 Victorian Lucretius: Tennyson and the problem of scientific romanticism
• 6 The opium-eater as criminal in Victorian writing
• 7 Obscure recesses: locating the Victorian unconscious
• 8 After the play: dreams of drama and death in the James family
• 9 Visuality codes the text: Charles Dickens’s Pictures from Italy
• 10 John Ruskin and the Victorian landscape
• 11 A life in writing: Ruskin and the uses of suburbia
• 12 Figuring the body in the Victorian novel
• 13 The Victorian novel as a self-conscious allusion
• 14 Plotting the Victorians: narrative, post-modernism, and contemporary fiction
• 15 Oscar Wilde at centuries’ end
• Notes on contributors
• Select bibliography
• Index