The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature

Josephine Guy, Ian Small

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136884450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Nineteenth-century Britain saw the rise of secularism, the development of a modern capitalist economy, multi-party democracy, and an explosive growth in technological, scientific and medical knowledge. It also witnessed the emergence of a mass literary culture which changed permanently the relationships between writers, readers and publishers.Focusing on the work of British and Irish authors, The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature:

• considers changes in literary forms, styles and genres, as well as in critical discourses
• examines literary movements such as Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism and Decadence
• considers the work of a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writers
• discusses the impact of gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism and book history
• contains useful, student-friendly features such as explanatory text boxes, chapter summaries, a detailed glossary and suggestions for further reading.

In their lucid and accessible manner, Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small provide readers with an understanding of the complexity and variety of nineteenth-century literary culture, as well as the historical conditions which produced it.

1
Introduction

What is nineteenth-century literature?

Overview

The division of literary history into a series of distinct chronological periods, of which the nineteenth century can obviously be one, takes place after the events which that history describes. It is therefore retrospective and may seem, to some extent, an arbitrary process, one which begs a number of questions. In terms which are relevant to the present volume, what makes 1800 or 1899 so special that they become respectively a beginning and an end point? What, in terms of the history of literature, do they mark the beginning and ending of? Any history has to make the study of the past manageable, and one of the commonest ways of doing so is by dividing it into chronological units. However, we might want to enquire whether events in literary history organise themselves neatly into a chronology, and whether that chronology can conveniently be mapped onto century divisions. As important is the question of defining what those literary ‘events’ are. Is literary history an account of works, authors, movements or styles? And how do literary events relate to those described in social, economic or political histories? In this chapter we examine briefly some of the general theoretical and methodological problems involved in writing literary history, and explain how the present volume responds to them.

Literary periodisation

We can glimpse the limitations of century divisions for literary historians by examining some of the debates which surround accounts of literary Romanticism in Britain. The origins of Romanticism are usually traced to the last decades of the eighteenth century, but many of its significant literary artefacts were produced in the early years of the nineteenth (certainly for British literary Romanticism). This complication is exacerbated by the untidy details of the genesis of particular literary works and the complexity of their publishing histories. For example, most students of literature would be surprised if, in any account of Romanticism, The Prelude by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) were not described as one of that movement’s most important works. However, although The Prelude began life in 1798–99 as a two-part unpublished poem, it was never made available to a contemporary reading public in that form. It subsequently underwent a long and fairly constant process of revision and enlargement, and was only published in 1850, and in a fourteen-book version which Wordsworth – by then dead – himself never oversaw (even the title of the work was not his). The question for the literary historian who is committed to organising literary history into century divisions is simple: to which of those historical ‘periods’ does The Prelude belong?

The same kind of observation can be made about some of the works and writers associated with literary Modernism: as with Romanticism, it is a literary movement generally thought to straddle a century division. On this occasion, although there is a large measure of agreement that its major works were produced in the first three decades of the twentieth century, its origins are usually traced to the 1890s, or on occasions even earlier. So if we wished to write an account of literary Modernism, how would we deal with those long-lived authors who began writing in one period – in Victoria’s reign – but who continued well into another, in this case, well into the Edwardian and Georgian eras. The careers of writers like Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) and W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) again make for untidy period divisions in the sense that, in Hardy’s words (written on New Year’s Eve, 1900, in his poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’), their careers coincided with ‘the Century’s corpse outleant’. Is Hardy a late Victorian who outlived his time, or a proto-modernist? By the same token, how would we categorise Yeats? Although he suggested, to use his own words, that he and his contemporaries were ‘the last Romantics’, and although his first volumes of poetry were published in the 1880s, his best work (in the view of most modern critics) did not appear until the First World War.

It was precisely this untidiness which led some literary historians to posit an intervening mini-literary period, termed the ‘literature of transition’ (and which gave its name to a literary journal, English Literature in Transition, founded in 1957 and still in print today), to describe the decades from 1880 to 1920. Other historians identified a shorter transitional moment, that of the ‘fin-de-siècle’ or 1890s, a decade in which, according to the early twentieth-century critic Holbrook Jackson, people ‘were convinced that they were passing not only from one social system to another, but from one morality to another, from one culture to another, and from one religion to a dozen or more’ (Jackson 1913: 31). Yet other historians have preferred to make a distinction between what Michael Wheeler terms ‘high’ Victorian and ‘late’ Victorian literature, when ‘late’ Victorian encompasses a time-span from around 1870 to 1901 (Wheeler 1985).

The division of historical periods can have profound consequences for the ways we categorise and value certain authors. For example, in 1888 Mary Ward (1851–1920) published, to considerable contemporary acclaim, what posterity has judged, albeit a little grudgingly, to be her most significant novel, Robert Elsmere. Yet, like Thomas Hardy’s, her prolific writing career, which encompassed novels, children’s fiction and criticism, stretched into the twentieth century, and she was still publishing in the year of her death, 1920. However, Ward almost never appears in histories of either fin-de-siècle or early twentieth-century literature (and today most of her post-1890s works are out of print). Even in histories of nineteenth-century (or late Victorian) literature, she is usually a marginal figure, represented only by one or two novels. The difficulty is that Ward’s commitment to literary realism and her conservative politics (she was a leading figure in the Anti-Suffrage League) sit uncomfortably with the formal experimentation and insistent questioning of ‘Victorian values’ which have often been seen as the most significant features of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary production. Put another way, the values which define Ward’s long career, and the consistency with which she adhered to them, make a poor fit with the categories with which historians have typically identified patterns in nineteenth-century literary history. They have tended, that is, to concentrate less on continuity than on identifying moments which mark important changes in literary sensibilities or styles. However, if we were to write a literary history which highlighted the stability of certain canons of literary taste, rather than attempts to challenge their hegemony, then we can imagine a narrative charting a continuous line of development linking the fiction of writers such as George Eliot (1819–80) and Ward to that of later realist novelists such as Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) and John Galsworthy (1867–1933). Just such a re-casting and revaluation of this moment in literary history has been suggested by at least one distinguished critic, John Carey (1992).

It might seem that one way of coming to terms with the dilemmas posed by long careers would be for the historian to focus on works, rather than on the lives of the writers who produced them. Unfortunately, however, we soon run into a similar set of puzzles because individual works, as we have seen in the case of The Prelude, may have a long genesis or period of gestation. Moreover, the particular ways in which a work of literature is placed in the public domain are often complex and can cover a long period of time. As we explain in more detail in Chapter 7, the book version of Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles was first published in 1891, but Hardy continued to revise it through successive editions until the 1920 Wessex Edition. Should we consider Tess in relation to the development of twentieth-century prose fiction, and to works like Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), first published in America in 1920 and in Britain in 1921, rather than in relation to late nineteenth-century ‘new woman’ fiction like The Woman Who Did (1895) by Grant Allen (1848–99)? The example of another famous nineteenth-century poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), is equally problematic. Hopkins published almost none of his poetry during his lifetime; on his death he bequeathed his papers to his close friend, the poet and critic Robert Bridges (1844–1930), and it was Bridges who arranged for the selection, editing and publication of Hopkins’s poems in 1918, almost thirty years after their author had died. However, a history which places those poems as post-First World War literary productions runs a serious risk of mischaracterising them, and certainly of misunderstanding both the context in which they were written and the culture to which they were a response.

Having noted these fairly basic problems, as well as acknowledging the necessity of making some kind of division of the past, we can observe that the period 1800–99 has been chosen because it is judged to possess more of the merits and fewer of the drawbacks of other candidates. The limitation of an obvious competitor – the ‘Victorian period’ (usually defined as 1832–1901) – is that it presupposes that a logic of literary history can be neatly mapped onto the longevity or otherwise of English or British monarchs (or, to be more precise, of some English or British monarchs, for we have Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, but not a ‘Williamite’ one). An equally problematic competitor is what some literary historians have termed the ‘long nineteenth century’, usually seen as beginning with the French Revolution and ending with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Here there are two reservations. We might reasonably object that developments in literary culture no more readily map onto the history of wars or revolutions than they do onto the reigns of kings and queens. More pragmatically, such a span of time is too unwieldy to be of much practical use for those interested in the specificities of literary production and literary history: the difficulties of justifying beginning and end dates are not resolved simply by extending them in either direction.

Literature and change: history versus chronology

It does not follow from the decision to divide literary history into centuries either that literary production over the course of any single century was uniform in character or that it changed in consistent ways or at a consistent rate. Nor does it follow that literary historians are in agreement about the events which might comprise such a history. History is not the same as a chronology; to adapt E. M. Forster’s famous comment made apropos of the novel, all histories ‘tell a story’. To be more precise, literary history may involve the telling of several different kinds of stories, not all of which are compatible with each other. The literary theorist David Perkins puts this point cogently when he argues that ‘whatever else they have hoped to accomplish literary historians have sought to represent the past and to explain it’. He goes on to elaborate this proposition: ‘to represent is to tell how it was and to explain is to state why – why literary works acquired the character they have and why the literary series evolved as it did’ (Perkins 1992: 13).

‘Series’ and ‘evolved’ are loaded terms. The concept of a ‘series’ presupposes a set of elements with common properties, or with certain values determined by a common relation. How one defines those properties or that principle of relation will therefore determine which elements – in this case, which literary works – are brought under the historian’s scrutiny. Another way to put this is to say that there can be two separate kinds of disagreement among literary historians. First, they can disagree about what it is they are trying to explain (or, in the terms which Perkins uses, how the series is to be defined). So are they writing a history of styles, genres, movements or of literary representations? Second, they can also disagree about the nature of those explanations, or what caused the members of the series to take the particular forms which they did take. For example, should literary histories be contextual in nature, in the sense that they involve reference to the details of the wider culture in which literary works are produced? And if so, which of those contexts – social, economic, technological, religious, political, legal and intellectual – ‘matter’, and to what extent can their relationship to literary works be said to be a determining one? Alternatively, it might be argued that literary culture has a high degree of autonomy and that changes in literary form can therefore be adequately explained in terms of endogenous ‘laws’ of literary development. This kind of explanation tends to inform histories of genres when the details of one work need to be understood only in relation to other works in the same genre.

In practice these two sorts of disagreement are closely linked. They usually converge on the question, what is a literary history for? And here a further range of possibilities presents itself. Some literary historians examine past literary production in order to identify those works which they perceive to have some relevance and value for the modern reader (although obviously there is room for competing views about which modern readers they have in mind). These historians are seeking to define a ‘canon’ of nineteenth-century literature, often by challenging the principles underlying the canons defined by earlier historians. Past literary works may be valued for the ways in which they engage with gender roles and sexual or racial identities, these concerns being prominent in the culture of the present day. Or past literary works may be valued for what are perceived to be their formal innovations or stylistic sophistication. Although considerations of a work’s politics and its form are not necessarily mutually exclusive tasks, it is none the less the case, as we explain in Chapter 3, that a history of nineteenth-century styles tends to brings different works into view, and will thus result in a different canon, when compared with a history of, say, women’s writing. Other historians, however, argue that the purpose of literary history should be documentary rather than evaluative: it should be limited to a description of the reading practices of past cultures and thus be an account of past literary values. In this last view, literary history amounts to writing a history of taste, although there will be differences of opinion about whose tastes, certainly in the nineteenth century, are worthy of the historian’s consideration. So would it be the taste of the many thousands of readers who bought the novels of Marie Corelli (1855–1924), most of which are today out of print; or of the few hundred who purchased those by Henry James (1843–1916), nearly all of which are still available in cheap paperbacks?

We can gain an idea of how the various presuppositions made by literary historians produce different sorts of histories of nineteenth-century literary production by considering one specific example, the case of Walter Scott (1771–1832). In the early decades of the nineteenth century Scott was a popular and celebrated writer, his life forming the subject-matter of one of the great biographies of English literature, the Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837–38) by John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854), Scott’s son-in-law. By contrast, today Scott rarely figures on the undergraduate curriculum, his verse and historical romances apparently being out of sympathy with modern interests. For the historian of taste, both Scott’s initial high reputation and its dramatic decline demand explanation, one which is generally made in terms of a larger story concerning changing attitudes towards British and Scottish nationalisms and equally far-reaching changes in the narrative strategies employed by nineteenth-century novelists. For the historian concerned with a canon, there is a different problem to address: has Scott been unfairly marginalised? Are there grounds for recuperating his works for modern audiences, perhaps by situating him as the originator of a genre – the historical romance – which continues to find popularity with the general reading public in the work of modern novelists such as Jean Plaidy or Philippa Gregory?

The differences among historians about how to conceive the subject-matter of literary history – the nature of what Perkins calls the ‘series’ – finds a parallel in attitudes towards that series’ evolution. In science there is much debate about the nature and pace of biological evolution, whether it moves in steady incremental ways, or whether there are sudden moments of change, a process which the biologist Stephen J. Gould famously termed ‘punctuated equilibrium’. Gould’s phrase turns out to be an apt metaphor for the ways in which literary historians have argued that some decades in the nineteenth century possess a greater significance than others in relation to both the nature and pace of change in literary production. The years between the mid-1840s ...