ART AND SOCIETY IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

Art and Society in the Victorian Novel

Essays on Dickens and his Contemporaries

Edited by

COLIN GIBSON Donald Collie Professor of English University of Otago, New Zealand

Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN 978-1-349-19674-6 ISBN 978-1-349-19672-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19672-2

© Colin Gibson 1989 Chapter 11 © D. W. Harding 1989

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 978-0-333-44745-1

All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

First published in the United States of America in 1989

ISBN 978-0-312-02064-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Art and society in the Victorian novel: essays on Dickens and his contemporaries / edited by Colin Gibson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-02064-4: 1. English fiction-19th century-History and criticism 2. Social problems in literature. 3. Literature and society-Great Britain-History-19th century. 4. Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870-Political and social views. I. Gibson, Colin. PR878.S62A78 1989 823' .8'09-dc19 88-10123

CIP

To Alan Horsman

Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgements xi

Notes on the Contributors xii

1 Laughter, Imagination and the Cruelty of Life: a View of Oliver Twist 1

John Watson

2 Bleak House: Another Look at Jo 16 Kathleen Tillotson

3 Form and Fable in Hard Times 29 John Holloway

4 The Choir-master and the Single Buffer: an Essay on The Mystery of Edwin Drood 43

W. W. Robson

5 'I must keep in good health, and not die': the Conception of the Self in an Unorthodox Victorian Novel 63

Miriam Allott

6 Love and the Aspiring Mind in Villette 82 Jocelyn Harris

7 The Historic Imagination in George Eliot 97 Ian Milner

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viii Contents

8 Physicians in Victorian Fiction 111 Philip Collins

9 Trollope's Love-stories: From Framley Parsonage to The Belton Estate 131

Juliet McMaster

10 Under the Greenwood Tree and the Victorian Pastoral 149 Lawrence Jones

11 The Complex Simplicity of The Ambassadors 168 D. W. Harding

12 'When 'Orner smote 'is bloomin' lyre' 185 Sydney Musgrove

13 Ernest Alan Horsman: a Checklist of Publications and Reviews, 1948-88 205

Index 208

Preface

The essays gathered in this volume have as their central theme the interface of personal vision and social address in the work of the greatest of the Victorian novelists. The art of writers such as Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and James had a Janus-like quality, displaying on the one side an idiosyncratic and sometimes highly unorthodox personal sensibility, and on the other exhibiting a shrewdly analytic and frequently reforming interest in the elab­orate social structure and complex morality of Victorian society.

Craftsmanship, the struggle to bring into being a form that adequately expresses the writer's artistic conception and yet satis­fies the requirements of the reading public, becomes an issue here, and several essays explore different facets of it, from Dickens's creation and development of Jo's prominent role in Bleak House to Hardy's attempts to match the expectations of his readers and critics in his depiction of rural life 'under the greenwood tree' and Henry James's working out of his theme of lost youth in the complexities of The Ambassadors.

Dickens offers a crucial example of a major novelist whose rich and complex art both reflected the writer's active engagement with his society and his own distinctive temperament; four essays are devoted to important works spanning his triumphant career, from Oliver Twist to the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. Charlotte Bronte and (perhaps surprisingly) Trollope figure as novelists who express highly individual attitudes in their fictions dealing with female personality and sexual relationships, and there are studies of George Eliot's quest for a valid historical awareness and under­standing, Kipling's assimilation of his many borrowings from earlier writers, and the portrait of the physician, that respected member of Victorian society, that emerges from a wide range of Victorian novels.

The essays collected here are the work of colleagues and friends

ix

X Preface

of Professor Alan Horsman, former Donald Collie Professor of English in the Department of English, University of Otago, who is currently engaged in writing a volume of the Oxford History of English Literature dealing with the Victorian period and whose distinguished career as an editor, literary critic, teacher and univer­sity administrator is only partly recorded in the list of his publi­cations printed at the end of this volume. It is the editor's agreeable duty to thank the authors both for their contributions and their patience during the process of publication. Thanks must also go to Lindsay Francis and Mary Sullivan, who typed successive drafts of the manuscript accurately and with unfailing cheerfulness, and to Valery Rose and Frances Arnold for their editor.ial work.

COLIN GIBSON

Acknowledgements

The editor and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly granted permission for the use of copyright material:

The Bodley Head, for the extracts from The Ambassadors, in The Bodley Head Henry James, edited by Leon Edel, vol. 8 (1970);

The British Council, for John Holloway's 'Form and Fable in Hard Times';

Oxford University Press, for the extracts from the World Classics edition of Jane Eyre, edited by Margaret Smith (1980).

xi

Notes on the Contributors

Miriam Allott has held chairs in English at the Universities of Liverpool and London. She is the editor of Keats and Arnold, and has published many articles and essays on the Brontes and other Victorian novelists and prose writers. She is currently completing (in collaboration with Nicholas Shrimpton) a critical edition of Arnold, and is preparing a critical biography of Clough as well as her book Poets on Poetry.

Philip Collins is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Leicester. He has published studies of Boswell, Trollope, Thack­eray and Tennyson. His work on Dickens as novelist and public performer includes Dickens and Crime, Dickens and Education, A Dickens Bibliography, Dickens: The Critical Heritage and Dickens's Public Readings.

D. W. Harding is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the Univer­sity of London. He has published a number of papers in the field of literary criticism, and his books include Social Psychology and Individual Values, Experience into Words: Essays on Poetry and Words into Rhythm.

Jocelyn Harris is Associate Professor of English at the University of Otago, the editor of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison and Duncombe's The Feminead. Other books include Samuel Richardson, and a study of Jane Austen. She has published a number of articles and essays on eighteenth-century and Victorian writers, and is currently engaged on a new edition of Richardson's Clarissa.

John Holloway is Emeritus Professor of Modern English, Univer­sity of Cambridge, and Fellow of Queens' College. His many books on English language and literature include The Victorian Sage, The

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Notes on the Contributors xiii

Charted Mirror, Narrative and Structure and (as co-editor) two collec­tions of Later English Broadside Ballads. His most recent publications are The Slumber of Apollo and The Oxford Book of Local Verses.

Lawrence Jones is Associate Professor of English at the University of Otago, author of Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Two Traditions in New Zealand Prose and an edition of Dan Davin's Roads from Home. He has published on Hardy and other Victorian writers as well as on New Zealand poets and prose writers. He is currently preparing a history of the New Zealand novel.

Juliet McMaster is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. Her publications on Victorian and earlier writers include Thackeray: The Major Novels, Trollope's Palliser Novels, Jane Austen on Love and Dickens the Designer. She is also the editor of Jane Austen's Achievement and co-author of The Novel from Sterne to James.

Ian Milner is Emeritus Associate Professor of English at Charles University, Prague, and has been Visiting Professor in English at the University of Otago. Author of The Structure of Values in George Eliot, he has written a number of articles and essays on nineteenth­century English fiction, particularly George Eliot and Dickens. He is also a well-known translator of Czech poetry.

At the time of his death in September 1987, Sydney Musgrove was Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland. His publications were chiefly concerned with Renaissance drama and poetry, including studies of Shakespeare, Jonson and Herrick, and editions of Twelfth Night and The Alchemist. He also wrote on T. S. Eliot and Whitman; Kipling was a favourite author.

W. W. Robson is Masson Professor of English at the University of Edinburgh. He has published several collections of critical essays dealing with nineteenth- and twentieth-century English authors and with the business of criticism itself. He is at present preparing a volume dealing with the twentieth century for the Oxford history of English literature.

Kathleen Tillotson is Emeritus Professor of English at the Univer­sity of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has published widely on such Victorians as Arnold, Carlyle, Dickens,

xiv Notes on the Contributors

Thackeray, Trollope and Wilkie Collins; her books include Novels of the Eighteen-Forties, Dickens at Work (with John Butt), Mid-Victorian Studies (with Geoffrey Tillotson) and editions of Oliver Twist and Dickens's letters. She is General Editor of the Clarendon Edition of Dickens's novels, and of his letters, being joint editor of the latest volume of the letters (vol. VI), covering the years 1850-2.

John Watson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Otago. He has edited a collection of the literary criticism of the New Zealand writer Charles Brasch, The Universal Dance, and published work on Dickens. He has recently completed a book, Dickens and the Cruelty of Life.