The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction

John Sutherland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138177192
• eBook ISBN: 9781317863328
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

With over 900 biographical entries, more than 600 novels synopsized, and a wealth of background material on the publishers, reviewers and readers of the age the Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction is the fullest account of the period's fiction ever published. Now in a second edition, the book has been revised and a generous selection of images have been chosen to illustrate various aspects of Victorian publishing, writing, and reading life.

Organised alphabetically, the information provided will be a boon to students, researchers and all lovers of reading. The entries, though concise, meet the high standards demanded by modern scholarship. The writing - marked by Sutherland's characteristic combination of flair, clarity and erudition - is of such a high standard that the book is a joy to read, as well as a definitive work of reference.

The Companion

A

Aaron The Jew, Benjamin L. Farjeon, 1894, 3 vols, Hutchinson. Usually reckoned to be Farjeon’s best novel incorporating as it does a mature examination of Victorian racial prejudice with a highly theatrical plot. The story begins in Portsmouth in the early 1870s. The philanthropic Doctor Spenlove saves an unwed mother, Mary Turner, from suicide. With the help of a benevolent Jewish pawnbroker the doctor contrives to have the unfortunate woman taken back by her former fiancé. Turner goes to Australia, leaving her bastard daughter to be adopted by a Gosport shopkeeper, Aaron Cohen. Aaron’s wife, Rachel, is struck blind while delivering a stillborn baby daughter of her own. To preserve his wife’s will to live, Aaron deludes her into thinking Mary Turner’s child is theirs. The Cohens subsequently move to the south of France, where Aaron prospers as an engineer and has a son Joseph. He returns to England in 1893, enriched. But he is ruined by a rival, Poynter (in fact Mary Turner’s original seducer), who publicises the true parentage of Ruth ‘Cohen’. Ruth, meanwhile, has made a happy marriage with a young aristocratic gentile, Percy Storndale, having been told the secret of her past. At the end of the novel, Aaron is rescued by Mary, now a respectable woman, who reveals how honestly he has always acted. Despite wild narrative improbabilities, Aaron The Jew has numerous scenes reflective of the mean-minded persecution inflicted on the Victorian Jew.

à’BECKETT, Arthur [William] (1844–1909). Like his somewhat better-known father Gilbert Abbott and his brother Gilbert Arthur, à’Beckett is primarily remembered for the family association with Punch*. Born in Fulham (where his father was a JP, as well as a prominent man of letters) he was sent to Felsted public school in Essex. But when in 1856 à’Beckett’s father died, the family income dwindled from £3,000 per annum to almost nothing and the subsequent years were difficult. After a half-hearted stab at clerking in the Post and War Offices (1862–64), the young man left the Civil Service for full-time work in periodical literature, around 1865. He subsequently edited a monthly magazine, Britannia, in the later 1860s and covered the Franco-Prussian War for the Globe in 1870. He was converted to Catholicism in 1874 (an act which may have been preparatory to his marriage two years later). In 1875 à’Beckett joined the staff of Punch, the paper which his father had helped found thirty years earlier. The younger writer’s services to the comic magazine are not highly regarded by historians of Punch. Unusually late in life, he determined to become a lawyer and was called to the Bar in 1882, at the advanced age of thirty-eight. But he never practised, returning instead to full-time journalism. At the high-point of his career, he edited the Sunday Times, 1893–95. On the side à’Beckett wrote half a dozen novels. Fallen Among Thieves (1870, hopefully subtitled ‘A Novel Of Interest’) is an early country-house murder story, featuring the detective* feats of John Barman. The Ghost Of Greystone Grange (1877) and The Mystery Of Mostyn Manor (1878) are routine thrillers. The author gives an amusing account of writing the second of these around some spare woodcuts which his publisher had. An active and convivial man, à’Beckett entered his recreation for Who’s Who as ‘amateur soldiering’ and was an active organiser for the profession of journalism. He died prematurely after an unsuccessful leg amputation. BL 7. ODNB. RLF. Wol.

ABELL, F[rank] (i.e. Charles Butler Greatrex, 1832?–98). Greatrex, who also used the pseudonyms ‘Lindon Meadows’ and ‘Abel Log’, was born in Birmingham, the son of a lieutenant in the Royal Marines. On graduation from King’s College, London he took orders in 1855 after which he held a succession of livings, mostly in the West Country. A writing parson of the hearty Charles Kingsley* stamp, he published a number of volumes of humorous sketches, random tales and boisterous verse. He also wrote (and himself competently illustrated) a successful novel, The Adventures Of Maurice Drummore (1884). This rollicking story of a Royal Marine evidently drew on his father’s experiences. BL 3. Boase.

The Academy (1869–1916). A review founded on Arnoldian principles by Charles Appleton, an Oxford don, assisted by Mark Pattison and a coterie of university intellectuals. For its first year, the journal was published by the firm of Murray*. But Appleton quarrelled with him on the subject of advertisements. Thereafter, the financial base of the paper was precarious. Uncertain of its market, the Academy was monthly until 1871, then a fortnightly and after 1874 a weekly costing initially 6d. The paper’s novel reviewers (who signed their pieces) are reckoned among the best in the period. (Edith Simcox writing as ‘H. Lawrenny’ stands out.) After 1874, the journal began the practice of group fiction reviews by Andrew Lang*, George Saintsbury and W. E. Henley. They were severe on fatuous stories and bad English and embody a systematic intention to raise the general ‘trashy’ and ‘coarse’ level of the English novel (as they saw it) to that of the French. Edmund Gosse* and (late in the century) Arnold Bennett were also Academy fiction reviewers of note. The paper shook off some of its Oxford academicism in 1896, when it was acquired by the rich American John Morgan Richards (he was the father of the novelist John Oliver Hobbes*). But its later career was erratic, and dogged by poor sales. The Academy was a principal model for the twentieth-century TLS which took over is format and style. BLM.

ACKWORTH, John (i.e. the Rev. Frederick R. Smith, 1845–1919?). A Methodist minister, Smith wrote tales dealing with the lives of Lancashire mill hands, prominently featuring dialect humour. His most popular work in this vein was The Clogshop Chronicles (1896). Its success inspired a sequel, Doxie Dent (1899), whose heroine is an enterprising mill lass of the kind that Gracie Fields was later to immortalise on film. Smith gathered together other of his Lancashire stories as The Scowcroft Critics (1898) and The Mangle House (1902). The Coming Of The Preachers (1901) and The Minder (1900) chronicle the rise of Methodism. The last, subtitled ‘The Story Of The Courtship, Call And Conflicts Of John Ledger, Minder And Minister’, probably contains autobiographical material. Otherwise, not much is known about Smith’s life. By the end of the century, there was no objection to nonconformist ministers writing novels though pseudonyms were apparently prudent. BL 10. EF. Wol.

Adam Bede, George Eliot, 1859, 3 vols, Blackwood. Eliot’s first full-length novel. A runaway success, it provoked intense curiosity about the mysteriously pseudonymous author. Adam Bede is set in 1799–1807, in rural ‘Hayslope’ which is recognisably a village in Eliot’s native Warwickshire. The Methodist revival is historically central in the narrative which opens with a scene introducing the carpenters Adam and Seth Bede. Adam, the harder and more interesting of the brothers, loves Hetty Sorrel who lives with her aunt and uncle Poyser at Hall Farm. Hetty is beautiful but shallow. Her cousin, Dinah Morris (also an orphan), is a Methodist evangelist, and has the moral depth Hetty lacks. Seth loves Dinah, but his adoration is returned only as friendship. The naively well-intentioned squire, Arthur Donnithorne, who has just come of age, sees Hetty in the dairy, and is captivated. Neglecting the counsels of his mentor, the Rev. Adolphus Irwine, Arthur seduces Hetty. Adam discovers what he thinks is mere flirtation, and thrashes the young squire whom previously he idolised. Arthur leaves in shame to join the militia, crushing Hetty with a farewell note. Listlessly, she agrees to marry Adam. But discovering she is pregnant, she follows the unwitting Arthur to Windsor. On the way, she lets her newborn child die, for which she is arrested and condemned to hang. There is a moving episode on the eve of the execution in which Hetty is consoled by Dinah, and Adam forgives the man who has wronged him. Hetty is reprieved on the scaffold and her sentence commuted to transportation. Adam marries Dinah. Arthur devotes his life to unspectacular reparation abroad. The novel, which is sternly moral, bears out Eliot’s maxim that ‘our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds’. But Adam Bede’s tone is lightened by the pastoral mood of its early sections, ‘full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay’.

‘In his tall stalwartness Adam Bede was a Saxon, and justified his name.’ From a cheap (6 s.) reprint of Adam Bede, George Eliot, 1874: illustrator W. Small.

ADAM, G[raeme] M[ercer] (1839–1912). Adam was born near Edinburgh, and educated in the city. He went to Toronto in 1858 as an overseas publisher’s representative and remained some years in Canada where he founded and edited various magazines, including the Canadian Monthly. In 1892, he moved to the USA. Adam wrote a number of books on Canadian history and with A. E. Wetherald co-authored the much reprinted historical romance An Algonquin Maiden (1887). Set in 1820s Canada, the work’s tone is chauvinistically hostile to the English colonial rulers for whom Adam seems to have retained a Scot’s antipathy. BL 1. RM. Wol.

ADAMS, Mrs [Bertha Jane] Leith (née Grundy, 1837–1912). Mrs Leith-Adams (as she was professionally known) worked on the staff of All The Year Round*, from 1878, and as one of the earliest English women journalists must have been unusually resourceful. Born in Cheshire, the daughter of a solicitor, her first marriage was in 1859 to Surgeon-General Andrew Leith-Adams. A resourceful woman, Mrs Leith-Adams nursed sick soldiers in a cholera epidemic in 1865 (see Madelon Lemoine, 1879). It would seem from the far-flung backgrounds to her stories that the couple travelled extensively in the course of his military duty and Adams went on to introduce army settings centrally into some of her later fiction, such as A Garrison Romance (1892). In 1882 Leith-Adams died, and his widow married the Rev. Robert Stuart De Courcy Laffan (1853–1927), Rector of St Stephen Walbrook. An active educationalist, Laffan took a particular interest in higher education for the working classes. Mrs Leith-Adams (as she still was authorially) continued to write a vast quantity of fiction, of which the novel Geoffrey Stirling (1883) was the most popular. This story of a wife’s ruthless revenge on the man who killed her husband is fashionably melodramatic. Like all Adams’s fiction, it is written in a choppy, breathless style that jerks the reader along. Her other novels show some skill in ringing the changes on the galloping serials favoured by All The Year Round. They include wholesomely jaunty fiction aimed at the adolescent, like Aunt Hepsy’s Foundling (1881); a new woman* novel about post-marital conflict, Bonnie Kate (1891); a patriotic military tale, Colour Sergeant No. 1 Company (1894), which went into six editions; and simple moral pieces for the young like Nancy’s Work, A Church Story (1876). Her later years were saddened by the death of her children by her first marriage. Among other worthy causes, Mrs Leith-Adams interested herself actively in the promotion of women’s and working-class education. She is recorded as being ‘an accomplished pianist and a lover of dogs’. BL 25. EF. FCL. ODNB. Wol. WW.

ADAMS, Francis [William Lauderdale] (1862–93). Remembered principally as a poet and essayist of Australian life, Adams was born as a member of the British garrison community in Malta. His paternal grandfather (also called Francis Adams) was a scholarly physician who gained fame as an authority on ancient Greek medicine. His father, Andrew Leith-Adams (1827–82), a Scot, was an eminent military surgeon and later a professor in zoology at Queen’s College, Cork, and his mother was the successful novelist Mrs Leith-Adams* (see above). Francis Adams went to school at Shrewsbury and spent the years 1878–80 as a student in Paris. He married and in 1882 emigrated to Australia having struggled unsuccessfully at school teaching. His lungs were already failing ominously. In Australia Adams joined the staff of the Sydney Bulletin and began to write extensively. He was, by the early 1880s, estranged from his family. His candid autobiographical novel Leicester appeared in 1885 and its ‘unnecessary realism’ affronted some reviewers. (Adams rewrote the novel as A Child Of The Age*, 1894.) In Sydney he had by now made a name for himself with his vigorous socialist poems Songs Of The Army Of The Night (1888). He was also writing on Australian topics for such English journals as the Fortnightly Review*. By this time his first wife had died and he married Edith Goldstone, a former actress, in 1887. There were, apparently, skeletons in her closet. The marriage may have been irregular. His writing had meanwhile won some popularity in England, where he returned in 1889. By now, Adams was seriously ill with consumption and he spent the winter of 1892–93 in Alexandria, Egypt. On returning to Margate he shot himself dead at the age of thirty-one after a particularly distressing haemorrhage. To the scandal of popular newspapers, Edith assisted him by removing his false teeth, allowing a ‘cleaner’ gunshot. Adams’s fiction is notable for its treatment of loneliness. Particularly effective are the early chapters of Leicester, which find the dreamy young hero adrift in London. John Webb’s End (1891) is a vigorous study of bush life in Australia. Adams followed it with Australian Life (1892). The Melbournians (1892) deals with Australian urban life and has as its hero a young journalist who defeats an English earl for the heroine’s love. As this plot suggests, Adams was politically radical and hated what he called English ‘religious liberalism’. At the time of his suicide he was writing against British colonialism in the Middle East and his fiercely anti-aristocratic play Tiberius (1894) was published posthumously. BL 5. ODNB. RM. Wol.

ADAMS, the Rev. H[enry] C[adwallader] (1817–99). Adams was born in London where his father was a judge. The family had its roots in the landowning Warwickshire gentry and Adams’s childhood was materially comfortable. He was educated at Winchester public school (whose history he later wrote). After graduating from Oxford, where he took a first-class degree in classics, he was ordained in 1846 and served as a clergyman in Berkshire until 1878, later moving to a living in Sussex. As clergymen could, Adams also taught in various schools and wrote textbooks on classics. In later life he was a prolific producer of stories for boys and it was his quirk to introduce the word ‘boy’ into titles wherever he could. Hence, for instance: Schoolboy Honour: A Tale Of Halminster College (1861) and The Boy Cavaliers (1869). As a novelist Adams’s main line was in adventure stories (e.g. For James Or George?, 1886), and mildly improving fiction for juvenile ‘Sunday reading’. As an educationalist he strongly advocated the monitorial system by which boys taught boys. BL 42. Boase. Wol.

ADAMS-ACTON, Marion (‘Jeanie Hering’, née Hamilton, 1846–1928). Little is known of her life. Marion Hamilton was born on the island of Arran, and around 1865 married the sculptor John Adams-Acton (1830–1910). As an author she wrote numerous novels under the Scottish-sounding pseudonym ‘Jeanie Hering’. The name, it is suggested, was taken from her adoptive parents (with the further suggestion that she had been born illegitimate). The Herings supposedly found her a waif on the Western Isle, and took the little girl to their bosom. (She is also sometimes listed by her publishers as Mrs Jeanie Acton.) Her writing career began with tales for juveniles, such as Garry, A Holiday Story (1867) and Little Pickles (1872). Her Golden Days, A Tale Of A Girl’s School Life In Germany (1873) was widely reprinted. Other of her fiction is more obviously for adults, although a maternal vein of moralising runs through all her published work. Adams-Acton had stopped writing well before her death. BL 20. FCL. (JAA) WW.

ADCOCK, A[rthur] St John (1864–1930). Born in London, Adcock abandoned his career in law for literature in 1893. His first book, An Unfinished Martyrdom And Other Stories appeared the following year. In 1897, he brought out his East End Idylls and in 1898, the follow-up, In The Image Of God. Both portray London slum life in the graphically authentic style of Arthur Morrison* and the cockney* school of fiction. In 1900, Adcock published two topical Boer War novels: In The Wake Of The War (set on the home front) and the more jingoistic The Luck Of Private Foster. Adcock later became editor of the Bookman* and lived comfortably in Hampstead as a leading man of twentieth-century letters. He married in 1887. BL 14. EF. Wol. WW.

ADDERLEY, the Hon. and Rev. James [Granville] (1861–1942). A son of the first Baron Norton (a Tory minister), Adderley was educated in the style of a young aristocrat at Eton and Oxford. At university he founded the Philothespian Society, and he would be a lifelong lover of the theatre. He graduated in 1883 and took orders in 1888. As a pastor he interested himself particularly in the missions and settlements set up to help the working classes of London. He was director of Oxford House at Bethnal Green (1885–86) and for fifteen years thereafter ran the St Phillips Mission at Plaistow in east London. This first-hand experience inspired his fiercely Christian Socialist novels, Stephen Remarx, A Religious Novelette (1893) and Paul Mercer (1897). The first, subtitled ‘The Story Of A Venture In Ethics’, concerns a clergyman (the younger son of a lord) who tries to set up a commune in Hoxton, north-east London, and is closely reminiscent of Mrs Humphry Ward’s* better-known Robert Elsmere* (1888). As with that novel, Gladstone admired it and congratulated the author. The novel, which had been turned down by a dozen publishers, went into four editions in its first year, selling over 20,000 copies in a pamphlet format. (It was one of the first novels published by Edward Arnold* and evidently helped set the house up.) The hero of Paul Mercer is a young millionaire who immerses himself in the slums of London’s East End. The plot bears out Adderley’s aggressive doctrine that ‘work is worship’ and in its details strongly recalls Walter Besant’s* All Sorts And Condition...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• A note on organisation
• Abbreviations and short titles
• List of illustrations
• The Companion
• Appendix A Proper names and pseudonyms Appendix A
• Appendix B Maiden and married names
• Appendix C The life cycle of a classic Victorian novel