The Victorian Period

The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830 - 1890

Robin Gilmour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317871309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This is a thought-provoking synthesis of the Victorian period, focusing on the themes of science, religion, politics and art. It examines the developments which radically changed the intellectual climate and illustrates how their manifestations permeated Victorian literature.

The author begins by establishing the social and institutional framework in which intellectual and cultural life developed. Special attention is paid to the reform agenda of new groups which challenged traditional society, and this perspective informs Gilmour's discussion throughout the book. He assesses Victorian religion, science and politics in their own terms and in relation to the larger cultural politics of the middle-class challenge to traditionalism. Familiar topics, such as the Oxford Movement and Darwinism, are seen afresh, and those once neglected areas which are now increasingly important to modern scholars are brought into clear focus, such as Victorian agnosticism, the politics of gender, 'Englishness', and photography. The most innovative feature of this compelling study is the prominence given to the contemporary preoccupation with time. The Victorians' time-hauntedness emerges as the defining feature of their civilisation - the remote time of geology and evolution, the public time of history, the private time of autobiography.

Chapter 1

The Sense of Time and the Uses of History

Time and autobiography

People of the nineteenth century were fascinated by time because they were conscious of being its victims. This was the age of Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit, anxiously consulting his watch (‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’), but it was also the age of the memento, the keepsake, the curl of hair cherished in the brooch, the photograph in the locket – all those sentimental stays against the quickening pace of time’s erosion. An awareness of time as history inspired the intellectual discoveries of the period, in geology, evolution, biblical criticism, archaeology, anthropology; and the search for origins and continuities was common to an agnostic scientist like Darwin and an Anglo-Catholic theologian like Newman. Wherever one looks, in almost every area of Victorian intellectual life, one encounters a preoccupation with ancestry and descent, with tracing the genealogy of the present in the past, and with discovering or creating links to a formative history. And what is true of the culture’s public discourse about itself was also true of individuals, driven in an age of rapid change to find coherence and meaning in the shape of their own lives, in autobiography.

Geology was the leading science in the first half of the nineteenth century and its message was of the immeasurability of time. The early Victorians were the first people to receive the chilling impact of ‘deep time’, as John McPhee called it: an expanse of time so vast that we can only grasp its scale metaphorically. Mark Twain’s metaphor in his ‘“Was the World made for Man?”’ of 1903 is more suggestive than most:

Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-nob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.¹

Today we live in a universe that is four and a half billion years old. Only custom muffles for us the thrill which the ‘terrible muses’ of geology and astronomy inspired in Tennyson and Edward FitzGerald: ‘it is not the poetical imagination, but bare Science that every day more and more unrolls a greater Epic than the Iliad; the history of the World, the infinitudes of Space and Time! I never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes me.’² The two sciences were often linked. Throughout his Principles of Geology (1830–33) Sir Charles Lyell compares the ‘immensity of past time’ opened up by contemporary geology to the ‘sublimity’ of the astronomer’s view: ‘Worlds are seen beyond worlds immeasurably distant from each other, and, beyond them all, innumerable other systems are faintly traced on the confines of the visible universe’.³ Time and space, geology and astronomy, combined to open up dizzying perspectives which seemed to dwarf mankind and its history, calling in question the consolations of religion and the optimism inherited from the Romantics.

There is one remarkable painting which seems to capture the existential emptiness of this moment in history – somewhat surprisingly, since the painter was a devout High Churchman who might have been supposed immune to such intimations of cosmic despair. This is William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay: A Recollection of October 5th, 1858 (1860; see Plate 3). Dyce (1806–64) was a man of developed scientific as well as religious and artistic interests; he knew that Pegwell Bay was particularly rich in fossils and the cliff’s geological strata are painted with knowledge and precision. Here they dominate the human figures in the foreground. It is a family scene, but worlds away from the cheerful bustle of W.P. Frith’s seaside paintings. The figures stand separate, the woman and the child looking beyond the spectator, perhaps out to sea, the other two gathering shells in the centre, and the tiny figure of the artist in the middle distance. Apart from the donkeys and their drivers beneath the cliffs, no other figures can be seen, and no houses, but in the centre of the sky is the faint streak of a comet. As Marcia Pointon has shown, this is Donati’s comet, which was 62 million miles away but at its brightest on 5 October 1858: hence the painting’s subtitle.⁴ Here Tennyson’s two ‘terrible muses’ are brought together and seen in contrast to the human figures on the shore, who look vulnerable and lost: isolated, straying figures rather than a cheerful family group. Pegwell Bay is a unique capturing of the great gulf which was opening up in the nineteenth-century’s experience of time, between the family album ‘recollection’ of a visit to the seaside and the terrifying vastness of geological time and astronomical distance.

To the modern mind there is something a little strange, even ironic, in the precision with which Dyce here attempts to fix his moment of recollection. When the very rocks on that desolate foreshore are likely to be older than the human species, why bother to record the day, month, and year? Because they belong to the private universe of memory, which has its own logic and importance. There is a saying of Goethe’s which Matthew Arnold copied many times into his Notebooks: ‘The highest happiness, says Goethe, is to find what it is that holds the world together within.’⁵ Holding the world together within, finding a coherence in the self which would at the same time impose some meaning and coherence on a rapidly changing world outside: this involved searching for the logic in one’s own memories, which is the task of autobiography. The autobiographical pressure which is felt so strongly in Victorian writing of all kinds – fiction, poetry, literary criticism, theology – is an expression of the desire to make sense of an evolutionary universe by discovering evolution in one’s own universe of memory. Or if not evolution, since the idea belongs to the second half of the century, then what Arnold called in his poem of that name the ‘buried life’ (1852), in discovering which ‘A man becomes aware of his life’s flow’ – ‘And then he thinks he knows / The hills where his life rose, / And the sea where it goes.’

No sooner does one recognise this phenomenon, however, than one encounters a major paradox of Victorian culture. The very forces which made the autobiographical task urgent also made it problematic. The prophets of progress saw the backward glance of autobiography as regressive, its surrender to introspection as a failure to measure up to the active, public virtues of a new civilisation. The consequence was the kind of strain which can be felt in In Memoriam (1850). Wordsworth’s self-exploration in The Prelude (1805; 1850) is epic and unabashed, whereas Tennyson always seems aware of the accusations of morbidity that might be directed at his song of private grief:

A third is wroth: ‘Is this an hour

For private sorrow’s barren song,

When more and more the people throng

The chairs and thrones of civil power? (XXI)

Introspection is not quite ‘manly’, this voice implies, and it is out of step with the spirit of the age. The fact that the age created profound dislocations in everyday life, and was throwing up problems in science and belief which made introspection almost inevitable for a thinking person, did not make autobiography of the frank Romantic kind respectable. It was still too closely associated with the turbulence of the French Revolution.

The early Victorian ambivalence about exploring the self is both revealed and transcended in one of the most influential books of the century. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–34) seems a strange and uncouth work today, but for readers of George Eliot’s generation it marked, as she said in 1855, ‘an epoch in the history of their minds’.⁶ They wrote about it in terms almost of personal gratitude, and it now seems clear that the book’s power for them lay in its addressing of the spiritual crisis of the time. However, Sartor differs markedly in form and tone from other spiritual autobiographies. The narrator is a student of German literature engaged in interpreting for British readers a work by a German philosopher, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (‘God-born Devil’s-dung’), called Die Kleider, a dissertation on the philosophy of clothes. It is not clear for much of Sartor Resartus – which means ‘the Tailor Re-Tailored’ – whether Teufelsdröckh is a seer or a madman, and in the course of answering this question, and interpreting his friend’s writings, the narrator is compelled to write his biography – or rather to assemble, from notes stuffed into six bags, the philosopher’s autobiography. This reconstructed autobiography forms the second of the work’s three books.

Sartor is a kind of narrative onion – a review article on Die Kleider, leading into an editorial essay on the problems of interpreting the notes stuffed in the bags, which then becomes a biography of Teufelsrockh, which then leads to a confessional core, which in turns explains and authenticates the clothes-philosophy in Book 3. Parodic and self-reflexive, Sartor plays Actively with the realities of Carlyle’s own situation and past. Like the Editor he was a reviewer who had made his reputation by introducing the German Romantics to British readers through a series of articles and reviews in the 1820s, by translating Goethe’s bildungsroman (novel of self-development) Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1824), and by writing a Life of Schiller (1825). He had also begun, but not completed, his own version of a bildungsroman, Wotton Reinfred (1827), and some of the formative experiences that would have been dealt with romantically there emerge here, distanced by irony and editorial commentary: his disillusionment with the dry rationalism he had encountered as a student at Edinburgh (‘Pedagogy’), disappointment in love (the Blumine episode), and the religious crisis of his early manhood, which is treated in the central chapters of Book 2 – ‘The Everlasting No’, ‘Centre of Indifference’, and ‘The Everlasting Yea’. It was these chapters above all which seem to have inspired and consoled the first generation of Victorian agnostics. They describe a process of religious loss and negation leading through a period of philosophical suspension to the rediscovery of faith – not in the Christian God, for that ‘vesture’ of the Divine has passed, but in an Eternal God behind all those particular manifestations. Belief-systems are only clothes, not the thing itself, and what is needed now is a spiritual retailoring: hence the book’s title and clothes symbolism.

This may sound banal enough in summary, but what gave it emotional punch was Carlyle’s topical awareness of the new immensity of time coupled with his religious feeling for the eternal behind it, for ‘only in the transitory Time-Symbol is the ever-motionless Eternity we stand on made manifest’.⁷ The one met the conditions of the scientific universe while the other satisfied religious longings which Christianity could no longer meet: modern men, such as the scientist T.H. Huxley, learned from Sartor that ‘a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology’.⁸ But not the absence of morality: the book’s power owed much to the austere solution Carlyle/Teufelsdröckh offered to the modern search for fulfilment.

Foolish soul! What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy? A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all. What if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe, (p. 146)

This is an important moment in nineteenth-century autobiography. Carlyle may have solved for a while the religious problem but in doing so he seemed to close the other great route to existential self-understanding which the romantic autobiographers had opened up (Byron here stands for self-indulgent introspection). Instead, the contemporary reader was left with the hard doctrine of work:

Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work. (p. 149)

As is the case with Carlyle’s work generally, the scriptural references here – Ecclesiastes 9: 10 and John 9: 4, to be precise – reinforce his moral exhortations with the emotional associations of the faith whose time, Sartor tells us, has passed. This rhetorical device looks suspect today, but it was almost subliminal for Carlyle and his readers, imbuing his severe doctrines with an emotion and authority they would not otherwise have had.

The liberation which Sartor brought to the first generation of Victorians was not achieved without a cost. Its influence was directly related to its power as spiritual autobiography, but the way in which the religious doubts were resolved, in a therapeutic turning-away from introspection (Byron) to renunciation (entsagen), work, and duty (Carlyle’s reading of Goethe), had the effect of slamming the door on introspection and autobiography. The book’s form and tone mock the self-indulgence of ‘these autobiographical times of ours’ (p. 73). The well-meaning but ironic narrator is never far away; we are made aware of him assembling Teufelsdröckh’s autobiography and consequently are never allowed the entirely unironic view of the making of the self one has in a great Romantic autobiography like Wordsworth’s Prelude. The persistent dualism in his presentation of Teufelsdröckh – is he ‘spirit’ or ‘dung’, seer or charlatan? – is calculated to fend the reader off. The fact that many contemporary readers nonetheless identified with him meant that they imbibed a scepticism about autobiography in the process of being consoled by it. Sartor Resartus fulfilled the functions of a contemporary version of Rousseau’s Confessions while simultaneously questioning the validity of confessional writing. Carlyle had his cake and ate it, but his readers were to be denied that luxury; their medicine was to be Aristotle’s dictum that ‘The end of Man is an Action, and not a Thought’ (p. 120).

In this way Carlyle’s most influential work did much to reinforce pressures coming from the outer life of society telling individuals to abandon their fruitless and self-indulgent search for the buried life, and sublimate their existential anxieties in work and duty. Such cultural prohibitions did not prevent the writing of many remarkable autobiographies in the period, but they also had the effect of forcing the confessional impulse underground, where it surfaced indirectly in various symbolic forms like the bildungsroman (Jane Eyre, published in 1847, is subtitled ‘An Autobiography’), the personal elegies of Tennyson and Arnold, the dramatic monologue, even the critical essay in the hands of Arnold and Pater – these give us often a more vivid and intimate sense of the inner life than formal autobiography, which tended to be reticent in crucial areas.

There were no such cultural inhibitions about the writing and reading of biography and history. To close one’s Byron and open one’s Gibbon or Herodotus or Macaulay was to move from the dangerously subjective to the fruitfully objective. History was a record of people and events, of action rather than introspection, and in the hands of a Whig historian like Macaulay, a record of progressive national development. Yet the antithesis is neither as sharp nor as simple as Carlyle liked to make it seem. History-writing is also an act of memory, a form of cultural autobiography. The various pasts which a period chooses to investigate, and the contemporary uses to which these pasts are put, tell us much about the anxieties of the present and the identity – or identities – which a society chooses to affirm. Serious historians like Macaulay and Froude were drawn to the 1688 Revolution or Elizabethan England out of a sense of ancestry, of a formative past that had set in motion forces still at work in their own society which they wished to clarify and defend. Others, like the artists and writers of Victorian medievalism, were less concerned with recovering the actuality of the past than with using it as a model to be set against the present, a mirror in which the ills of the present could be seen by force...