Scepticism about the term ‘Victorian’ is part of a more general scepticism aboutliterary history and criticism. An account is given of the doubts and risks involved,specifically, in writing the volume
The Victorians 1830–1880
for the OxfordEnglish Literary History series. The problems in establishing a framework forthe Victorian age are themselves a version of the problems confronted by manyVictorians. These problems are historical (in particular to do with secularization andthe loss of home); they are also part of a continuous conversation amongst theVictorians that has a self-conscious ongoing history. A defence is offered of whatconstitutes a
literary
history – in particular of the Victorians, with whom literatureoften functions as an agnostic holding-ground for exploration, testing the areabetween the particular and the general in specific human terms. Literary historyrequires not only knowledge but also imagination; it is not an end in itself but a
means to an end, particularly in relation to Victorian questioning.
Let’s be clear about the licence for scepticism: if we’re going to let it inhere, with regard to the validity of the term ‘Victorian’, then it has to be freeto go everywhere. Scepticism about the concept of the historical ‘period’– whether it is ‘the Victorians’ or not – requires scepticism about thereality of classification itself. It involves questioning the very possibilityof writing both history and literary history. And that also includes trying towork out what if anything is the difference between writing ‘history’ andwriting ‘
literary
history’.What is more – while we are about it – doubts as to whether literary
history is anything more than a convenient fiction are themselves a specialcase of what is potentially a more general mistrust – concerning the epis-temological status, value and purpose of literary criticism itself. Literarycriticism is on the face of it a manifestly second-order activity: it cannotexist without the literature that comes before it, at least chronologically.As a result it can often seem embarrassingly in danger of ‘fitting’ literatureinto intellectual concepts of the critic’s own invention – including theconcept of a particular ‘period’. The fact that the author might not choose,or could not have chosen, to use the framework provided by the critic istoo often assumed to be prima facie evidence in said author of consciousor unconscious evasion, of the power of historical pressures, of confusion,
subterfuge, or even a want of rigorous formal intellect. Sometimes it feelsas though the assumption is that the language of literature is not a primaryor a trustworthy language (where somehow the critic’s is).
I welcome this wide-ranging scepticism. I am not saying that wideningthe problem in any way solves the question of the viability of ‘the Victorian’.But students of the book should be as alert as they can bear to be to thedangers of living in Plato’s cave. If we want to talk about books there is aprice to be paid, in terms of the risks of mistake and distortion, and it isbetter that way than simply leaving books alone.
In what follows, I will speak autobiographically for a little while – notbecause I think the personal realm is itself invulnerable to scepticism, butfor two pragmatic reasons. One, because it offers a preliminary language fordescribing the workability of the term Victorian as I have experienced it inthe process of trying to write a book. And two, because it is where I amstill left having to start from, when I am uncertain about everything else.
So I simply report that in 1997 I was asked by the general editor of thenew Oxford English Literary History to write the volume provisionallyentitled
The Victorians
; that the beginning and end dates – 1830 to 1880– were decided for me in advance and thus were not protected by thedefence of coinciding with the reign of Victoria; and that from thenon I had very considerable doubts both about my own capabilities inundertaking the project and about the feasibility of the project itself. Thebackground to those doubts I now offer in the form of a simplified sketch– as a starting point rather than a justification. But these doubts and risks,I must add, were very much part of the project: had Oxford UniversityPress wished to avoid them, they could have taken the much safer routeof not having single-author volumes and gone instead for the ‘diversity’of essays by different hands.
At any rate, from the early 1980s I had spent years at the University ofLiverpool warning students, particularly on the part-time and full-timeVictorian M. A., to avoid the ‘V’ word – to avoid forcing complex andindividual literary works into simple pigeonholes such as ‘The Victorians’.Too often so-called ‘background knowledge’ meant simple, second-handgeneralizations such as ‘for the Victorians, women were either madonnasor whores’ or ‘the Victorian age was a time of great social change’; genera-lizations that pre-empted and avoided the venture of individual, imagina-tive thought. I did not believe that the study of literature was really asub-branch of something else – of some discipline with apparently greaterclarity or objectivity such as, for example, social or political history. Rightlyor wrongly, I thought literary historians were often doing a taming job,creating an institutionalized subject by suppressing a subjectivity in othersthat they were falsely claiming to avoid in themselves. They were flatten-ing the very life of ‘texts’ into ‘examples’, into a dry residue of experiencethat they called ‘knowledge’. To me, impressed by Nietzsche’s argumentin his essay ‘On the uses and abuses of history for life’ in
, theirs was really a reductive knowingness. I preferred it if,without undue preparation, readers were imaginatively moved by thebooks on offer. On the whole, the risks involved in contextual ignoranceseemed to me well worth taking and, actually, the mistakes and anachronismsrather easily corrected.
Of course a change in the climate of literary history was already comingfrom far more sophisticated sources. But the shift, for example, from oldto new historicism was still of course a commitment to historicism. Increas-ingly, the force lay with those who so insisted upon the historical relationbetween literature and social formations as to make ‘society’ itself theprimary subject-matter of literary and then cultural studies. But one ofthe reasons I was interested in the Victorian realist novel was that I feltit offered an
alternative
to the over-determined predictability often charac-teristic of a socio-political language. Scepticism, where it includes thepower of a sudden shift of mind and direction, should threaten the exist-ence of any self-enclosed discourse. And the mid-nineteenth-centuryrealist novel was a supreme example of this refusal to foreclose, offering anexperimental holding-ground in which human unpredictability and therecalcitrance of human content were written into the possibilities of theauthor’s brain. That at least was one identifiable phenomenon emergingbetween 1830 and 1880 in the cultural shift from poetry to the novel. Inthe rich and dense mix of the novel’s content, there was at its best some-thing more challenging than liberal tolerance or humanitarian curiosity: inthe language of human character and situation, there was a mental capacityto use the imagination to find
more
in the reality of the human world thancould make for the control of simple opinion or comprehensive conclu-sion. It is the equivalent of what Ruskin found in the paintings of Turner:
One of the best tests of its excellence was the expression of
infinity
. . . It doesnot, indeed, follow that what is infinite, always is true, but it cannot bealtogether false, for this simple reason: that it is impossible for mortal mind tocompose an infinity of any kind for itself, or to form an idea of perpetualvariation, and to avoid all repetition, merely by its own combining resources.The moment that we trust to ourselves, we repeat ourselves, and therefore themoment we see in a work of any kind whatsoever, the expression of infinity,we may be certain that the workman has gone to nature for it.
2
For me, that unpredictability marked a crucial difference between thecreativity of art-thinking and the coercions of ordinary thinking. Moreover,the recognition and the inclusion of that creative unpredictability was alsowhat gave
literary
history the advantage over the writing of history itself.For only a literary language offers the imaginative experience of deepmeaning. And if that is a contestable proposition, then scholars need torevisit Matthew Arnold’s working distinction between a ‘literary’ and a‘literal’ language – where defining and justifying that distinction, at thetheoretical level, remains a major task facing those who wish to privilege‘literature’ over other forms of discourse. Something of this task has been
done already, with Newman rather than Arnold, in John Coulson’s
Religion and Imagination
.
3
There ‘literature’ also includes those non-fictionalwritings that used to be called ‘letters’: such writings, Newman argues in
The Idea of a University
4
, belong to literature when they involve a powerof thinking that requires the full range of the language rather than thedelimited vocabulary of logical and technological ‘science’.
In such areas, instead of merely historicizing such Victorians, as if theywere a quaint and distant phenomenon, I would argue that it is better tohear them as directly as possible as presences – not least when they areinvolved in the very defence and establishment of the study of literature.For nineteenth-century literary critics are often self-consciously membersof a Coleridgean clerisy. They believe that it is in the service of this deepliterary sense of meaning that literary scholars act as go-betweens – bringingcreative thinking into ordinary contemporary discourse, so that the lattershould not be left impoverished in reductive complacency, and the formernot abandoned to aesthetics alone. It is a belief at least worth takingseriously as a human possibility.
At any rate, it is the belief in the primary importance of literary lan-guage as the deepest form of human expression that explains why the useof quotation in a literary history should stand for more than proof, cor-roboration, example, or illustration. In theory it must always remaintrue that all acts of quotation are necessarily selective and partial, and thequotations themselves are affected by the context into which they arecalled. But in the specifics of the practice of writing literary history thereremains a working distinction: between quotation that exists secondarilyto exemplify the critic’s argument, and an argument that exists to servethe primary language of the crowning quotation it releases. One decisionI did feel certain of was that by the extended use of quotation, my bookwould seek to retain as much as possible of the felt linguistic and emotionalautonomy of the literary works upon which it depended.
Yet oddly, perhaps, it wasn’t a solution to any of my problems abouthistoricism that it was becoming ever more fashionable
not
to trust ‘his-tory’ as unproblematic. In the world of literary theory, there has developedan increasingly sceptical awareness of ‘constructs’ – of alleged contexts,putative periods, and unadmitted ideologies past and present. What hasbeen offered instead is a belief in ‘heterogeneity’, ‘otherness’, and ‘discon-tinuity’. Indeed, as I write, perhaps the intellectual option most charac-teristic of the current state of the discipline would be this one: that thereare no objective or unified ‘periods’, no starting points or end points inthe process of history; they are symptomatic fictions to hide our fear ofthe multifarious, unassimilable nature of what we try to call ‘reality’.
Again, I have some sympathies with this position – but mainly when,in relation to the Victorians, it involves pain and bafflement rather thanthe anachronism of a post-modern shrug. That is to accept too easilythe possibility that diverse illusions are built only upon an underlying
meaninglessness. For if you can say, with ease, that there is no reality, butonly our fictive interpretations of it, then that too, unsceptically offered,is a rather comfortable assumption, letting us off a hook upon which somany Victorians were impaled. Living in the very midst of time – unableto get to an absolutely unchanging perspective outside or above it – isitself a grave concern that lies behind the Victorian novel
and
the Victoriansequence-poem alike, as part of the story of secularization. And again theemerging existence of those particular literary forms at that time surelypoints to something significant enough to deserve distinct historical status.
At any rate, even if all interpretations were to some degree ‘fictional’,they are not fictional in the way that
Middlemarch
or
David Copperfield
are:the difference between a complex novel and a defensive but illusory catego-rization is about as great as any difference could be. Moreover, if all-there-isis finally only an ungrounded diversity of interpretations (and there isnothing that can be called ‘Victorian’ but just a series of differences), thenmy reply must be that one of the things that can be called characteristi-cally Victorian is an anxiety about just such heterogeneity, culminatingin the critical debate around John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty
5
– the debate thatquestions whether diversity itself is a desirable goal, a human necessity, ora modern problem of incoherence.
In other words, in all this, I took and still take very seriously the pro-position Isobel Armstrong makes in the introduction to her
Victorian Poetry
:‘It is clear that the nature of the experiencing subject, the problems ofrepresentation, fiction and language, are just as much the heart of Victor-ian problems as they are the preoccupations of modernism. The differenceis that the Victorians see them as problems, the modernists do not’.
6
Ofcourse, it was risky of Professor Armstrong to speak thus boldly of‘Victorians’ and ‘modernists’, seeing the former characteristically in termsof ‘problems’ that might not be treated as such further along the road ofsecularization. Those who cannot accept that later freedom might be saidto be not fogeys but Victorians in a post-Victorian age, and indeedperhaps one of the functions of reading past literature is to help readersto the recognition: ‘That’s where I must have got it from!’ But there isa genuine historical point in Professor Armstrong’s case. As a result ofmanifold contemporary upheavals, social and religious, ‘the Victorian’ inits deepest literary and cultural manifestations characteristically has to dowith questionings rather than certainties, with serious debates and pain-fully registered problems located at the very foundations of the modernworld. That is not to say that one cannot find an equal array of surfacecomplacencies and willed certainties. But the literary historian cannotavoid acknowledging the possibility of a distinction in language betweenresponses that are left as symptomatically and repetitively knee-jerk, nomatter who is making them, and those that are struggling to think harderand go deeper than that. If we refuse to make that distinction, we are stillno more modern than the first generation of anti-Victorian writers, the
But anxiety, conscience, even defensiveness arise because ‘theVictorian’ manifestly involves a general historical phenomenon taken withgreat personal seriousness in the nineteenth century: the increasing threatof the loss of belief in God, and with it the developing story of secular-ization, and the throwing open of all questions as a result. Thus, forexample, W. H. Mallock’s aptly challenging book
Is Life Worth Living?
8
offers an account of what was historically new in the situation: the loss ofa Christianity that had underpinned the meaning of a whole world-order.
This religious concern seemed and still seems to me one of twohistorical developments that have a clear objective status, which can beproven by the sheer repetition of individual experiences. For in this crisis,even unbelief is experienced as a religious phenomenon, in the frequentunwillingness for it to be unbelief, in the intensity and need and searchinvolved. The second development that produces questioning has to do,of course, with the uprooting, re-ordering and transforming effect of theIndustrial Revolution and urbanization in creating a new society. But, inparticular, I stress the fact that increasingly people could no longer expectto live the whole of their lives in the house where they were born.Without the availability of approved patterns of adaptation to change,the disorienting effect on memory is a major new personal experience inthe social history of the nation.
Yet all the time the writer of a literary history can hear the riposte: Thisis still just your view of ‘the Victorians’, your emphases and your partialselection of who and what matters. On what basis do you take this view,make this selection, or even use the name ‘Victorian’ for what you say goeson? It is true that all the most
interesting
cases will be on that borderlinewhere we are not sure of what is subjective, what objective. But it isn’tgood enough simply to admit that these are ‘my’ Victorians, offered, withsome supporting evidence, as a contribution to an ongoing conversation.Nor will it quite do to say, more generally, that all history is a partial,tidying selection, that the only complete history would be the past itself– which not only is impossible to reproduce but would not be a historyat all. As David Perkins rightly says in
Is Literary History Possible?
, suchadmissions are a truth ‘that does nothing to clarify what might be moreacceptable, what less, and by what criteria’.
9
What is more, ‘by what criteria?’ is a worse question for the literaryhistorian than for the writer of more public history. There is no doubt asto who is the prime minister at any particular point; there is no suchvalidation as to the importance of Christina Rossetti (and which partic-ular poems of Christina Rossetti?) in the history of Victorian poetry.
10
Dismiss her religious poetry, such as ‘An Old-World Thicket’, in a pre-ference for ‘Goblin Market’, or rate Tennyson’s
Maud
above Tennyson’s
InMemoriam
, and the place and possibility of religious writing in the historyof poetry diminishes. Change your mind or read another critic of opposite
views, and possibility itself changes again. The Victorian age was anxiouslyself-conscious about its historical position as a time of transition. At theheart of Matthew Arnold’s poetry is the disconcerting recognition that tobe born fifty years earlier or later changes the very possibility of what canbe thought. And yet the literary history of the times is not as historicallydetermined as was thought or feared by some people even at the time itself.On the contrary, literary history remains precarious and uncompleted,sited between past and future: dependent first of all upon the beliefsmaintained or lost by contemporary individuals and the creative powerand literary skill with which their thoughts and feelings are made existent;and then dependent too upon the subsequent value that is granted ordenied the uncertain achievement. The debate about canonical and non-canonical texts is only one part of that problem. There is always – in Mill,in Darwin, in the novel itself – the thought that variety exists for the sakeof possibility, for the sake of the history of the future, and that changingviews of the past are part of that story as human beings lose, re-call andtransform neo-genetic possibilities embodied and stored in the writingsof earlier centuries. That might indeed be one of the purposes of literaryhistory: to retain the reservoir of possible human thoughts and abilities,to refresh the memory of the cultural gene-pool. Again, I make no apologyfor saying that this is a Victorian thought: F. W. H. Myers, for example,in the posthumously published
Human Personality
11
argues that in thecourse of evolution human powers that were not immediately useful forthe purpose of survival were nonetheless saved by subliminal storage belowthe level of consciousness.
Yet embarrassments and difficulties still pile up as soon as one dares tosay ‘a Victorian thought’, even in respect of evolutionary theory. One voicesays: ‘If you start by trying to write about “the Victorians”, then inevitablyyou are going to lump them together, you are going to coerce them intoyour tight little thematic chapters.’ Another responds: ‘But if you startby just saying how different they are, so what? What will hold your booktogether and stop it being a mere survey? And isn’t difference itself stilla category?’ It’s stupid to
define
a period – particularly when the so-calledperiod is one in which static taxonomies such as that of Linnaeus aregiving way to more dynamic Darwinian models of process. But it also seemsevasively over-refined and implausible to say there was nothing at all incommon between the writers or between their forms and language,nothing at all different at
some
point from previous ages (if we could define
them
too).I clearly needed something other (and more interesting) than ‘they are
all the same’ or ‘they are all different’ – a space or place for investigationbetween the two. And again I found helpfully warning-voices withinVictorian writings themselves. In particular I was interested in accounts ofthe to-and-fro action and reaction between the human need for classifi-cations – in order to be able to do thinking at all – and the countervailing
necessity not to believe in these categories as truth but rather continu-ously to test, un-do and re-do them. Thus, John Stuart Mill speaks of thedanger of ‘half ideas’ or ‘half truths’ in his essay on Coleridge (1840).
12
The very history of opinion, he fears, is the ironic and restless story of succes-sive, mutually weakening alternatives: of any important but partial truth,one party or one age tends to ‘give to that truth too large, the other to giveit too small, a place’. The history of ideas is all too often the result of ‘anoscillation’ between two conflicting modes of thought, each of them atbest half-truths, one coming after another. One idea at a time: there seemsto be something almost inherently wrong with the way we have to doour thinking in order to be able to think at all. Ironically, the very epistemo-logical problem – that we can’t hold it all together in one – creates thesuccessive history of partial attempts at a total solution.
But if, in the face of that fear, Mill himself still sought synthesis amidsta broken and conflicted world, what I found most helpful in my readingwas something lodged agnostically
between
alternatives, as a difficultpersonal holding-ground. Here, for example, is David Copperfield in hissecret admission to himself that his youthful marriage to Dora is not as hehad dreamed of it being – this is, he thinks, in part the general adjustmentto reality that inevitably all adults have to go through in a post-Romanticworld, and yet there are also specific things wrong with this particularmarriage which need not have been as they were:
Between these two irreconcileable conclusions: the one, that what I felt wasgeneral and unavoidable; the other, that it was particular to me, and might havebeen different: I balanced curiously, with no distinct sense of their oppositionto each other.
13
This was the agnostic space – in between the particular and the general– that I wanted to follow the writers in occupying. For this was the deepplace where almost everything in the human world was held in solution, inthe midst, in the melting pot. Around that space there was a wide varietyof almost wildly divergent and split-off views, often anxiously over-excitedby controversy. But it was the almost unrealizable space in their midst thatwas the lodging-place of the thoughts that emerged on every side. Andit was there that I located the troubled heart of the world nominally called‘The Victorians 1830–1880’.
I knew I could not answer Perkins’s sort of question – ‘By what crite-ria?’ –
before
I began writing, but what about in the midst of it? Nor wasit absolutely clear to me that it was either an epistemological necessityor an epistemological possibility to establish all the criteria in advance. Therationalist Mill might have thought, or hoped, so. But then for Newman,for example, what we now call reasoning in a hermeneutic circle wasinevitable:
I am what I am, or I am nothing. I cannot think, reflect, or judge about mybeing, without starting from the very point which I aim at concluding. My
ideas are all assumptions, and I am ever moving in a circle . . . If I do not usemyself, I have no other self to use.
14
My thought about a method of procedure therefore became this: that Icould use these Victorian debates, as between Mill and Newman, to explorequestions inside the book that I could not deal with on my own outsideit. Why? Because my problems about ‘the period’ if such it was (How to findan overview or a framework? What to trust? How to know where wewere or where to start from?) were themselves inherited from the period.I realized that that of course was why I really wanted to write the book:these were inherited problems, and not just to do with writing about ‘theVictorians’ but with thinking in the world after the radical changesof the nineteenth century. I thought and still think that I (and not just I)had genuinely got these problems from ‘the Victorians’, or, more aptly, fromthe situations they confronted in the very formation of the modern world;though there could be no 100 per cent guarantee or proof that ‘they’ hadnot got them from me. The dangers of circularity and over-identificationare inescapably plausible but still general. I would have to leave to the writing– and then to the judgment of my readers – the question of how fair,how scrupulous, and how insightful I was
specifically
being. What I amsimply challenging here is the assumption that trying to get inside theminds of Victorian writers is inherently impossible or, indeed, somehowmore epistemologically dubious than remaining historically outside them.
I repeat: if I wasn’t going to be able to begin my project by first settlingthe epistemological principles of doing it, what I could do was seek toexpress and test those difficulties not outside or prior to what I was doing,but within the very act of trying to do it. And that itself was a character-istically ‘Victorian’ way of embedded procedure in the midst of difficultythat I would thus replicate. Thus – to give a single example for the moment– John Henry Newman again, on the impossibility of the mind being ableto capture and express the nature of its own movements:
No analysis is subtle and delicate enough to represent adequately the state ofmind under which we believe, or the subjects of belief, as they are presentedto our thoughts. The end proposed is that of delineating, or, as it were,painting what the mind sees and feels: now let us consider what it is to portrayduly in form and colour things material, and we surely find the difficulty, orrather the impossibility, of representing the outline and character, the hues andshades, in which any intellectual view really exists in the mind . . .
15
Consider the delicate relation of ‘represent’ to ‘present’; the subtle mentaldifference still made by little prepositions such as ‘under’ or ‘to’; the feltinescapability of recourse to metaphor in ‘as it were’ or ‘the mind sees andfeels’; the writerly care in the insertion of little words such as ‘adequately’,‘enough’, and ‘or rather’ – even in the very midst of saying that no care will
finally
do. By such means, the reader feels that things do ‘really exist inthe mind’, the reality partly felt through the mind’s failed effort wholly
to communicate it. It is not like the despair of saying it cannot be done– ‘words are inadequate’ – and thus not doing it. The mental work still goeson
inside
that predicament – in a sort of consciously flawed perseverancecharacteristic of a higher or deeper version of the ‘Victorian’ ethic ofserious effort. R. H. Hutton described this position as of those who feltthemselves not able to look down on the earth from above, becausesituated below, in life’s midst.
16
Yet in the very act of showing how he isnot able to do it, Newman gives an intimation of what being able to doit would be like. As Newman put it in a notebook, ‘We can only set rightone error of expression by another’: the only thing we can do is work ‘bysaying and unsaying to a positive result’.
17
Saying
and
unsaying at once.I pause for a moment here to plead guilty again to writing ‘a higher
or deeper version’ of the Victorian ethic in the preceding paragraph. Forthat was another implicit principle I discovered in the act of writing: thatthough I might cite Samuel Smiles or Sara Ellis, often as representatives,what I was always looking for was an understanding of the work ethicor the idea of home or family that was not merely the commonest way ofexpressing it, but the most exciting or disturbing, the most imaginative –in short, the most likely to make a modern reader inward with what itfelt to believe in such things, rather than place and dismiss them, externally,as merely passé Victorian phenomena that we have outgrown. This meantlooking for these ideas and feelings at their most powerful, whether it wasat their most committed or at their most troubled, and there again it wasliterature that was going to do what Ruskin called heart-work and notmerely head-work, making things real and realizable again. That too is oneof the meanings of Victorian realism.
Thus my working method was to turn my problems into my subject-matter, in so far as I was finding within the Victorian works I was readingan expression of difficulties kindred to those I was having in thinking aboutthem. The more the examples and the wider their range, the greater theprobability that I was not just importing or inventing the phenomena. So,for example, Carlyle not only on writing history:
The most gifted man can observe, still more can record, only the
series
of his ownimpressions: his observation, therefore, to say nothing of its other imperfections,must be
successive
, while the things done were often
simultaneous
. . . Narrativeis
linear
, Action is
solid
.
18
but on the experience of actually living in the midst of it:
Men understand not what is among their hands . . . It is, in no case, the realhistorical Transaction, but only some more or less plausible scheme and theoryof the Transaction, or the harmonised result of many such schemes, each varyingfrom the other and all varying from truth, that we can ever hope to behold.
19
Categories, forms, frameworks, directions, locations: whilst trying to stayloyal to the individuality of each experience, I found example after exampleof these concerns recurring, beyond at least any conscious planning.
As a consequence, a second working method became explicit to me,which I subsequently remembered finding best expressed in a sentencefrom Emerson’s essay, ‘History’. Emerson writes, ‘All public facts are to beindividualized, all private facts are to be generalized’.20 That is to say: wher-ever I found what had become an inert fact or cliché (for example, theterrible state of the cities and factories), I tried to turn it into a Victorian’spersonal experience, so that history became imaginative memory. Andwherever I found a powerful individual experience, I tried through aconceptual language to get out of it the thoughts contained within it– because of a belief that, even in troubled loneliness, the personal in themid-nineteenth century was not merely a matter of sentiment or temper-ament but a site inseparable from deep philosophical and theologicalimplications enfolded within it, for want of resolution elsewhere. Again,I see in retrospect evidence that this two-way movement between partic-ular and general is consonant with all that went into the formation of themind of George Eliot, in that struggle to work between individualspecifics and transcendent concerns.
In short, I found the experiences described within my book to be very‘workable’ indeed: whether the debates were internal to one person orexternal between two or more, what I found was something like a con-tinuous conversation sometimes explicit or specific, very often implicit andwide-ranging. The authors were often reading each other, respondingto each other, positioning themselves around questions and against rivals.And this continuous conversation – about freedom or marriage or faith– had a self-conscious ongoing history. It felt impossible to George Eliotto go back and adopt the position held by Charles Dickens. It felt impos-sible to Thomas Hardy to hold onto the position held by George Eliot.Though Christina Rossetti retained religious faith, her poetry still seemsoddly closer to that of Hardy than to that of Newman. I do not mean toimply historical determinism here, an inevitable movement to ever increas-ing secularization. I only indicate continuous attempts to retain or re-definehitherto religious concerns in the light of ongoing questioning of humanpurpose.
I have written relatively informally on this occasion, in order to tryto give a tentative account of a process that cannot be restricted to (but Itrust includes) the workability of the term ‘Victorian’. I want now to tryto offer four summary end-points – in the first two of which I will trymerely for the clearest statements of intended outcome I can, and in thelast two the boldest and most provocative I dare.
1. The term ‘Victorian’ itself. The history of the term is of course reasonablyclear and I haven’t wanted to labour the point here. But in short: inPortrait of an Age (1936), G. M.Young says that the word ‘Victorian’ firstappeared in the 1850s to register a new self-consciousness21, thoughthe Oxford English Dictionary cites E. C. Stedman’s Victorian Poets (1875).
Actually, it may be said that many of the leading Victorian writers werein some sense anti-Victorian – or, alternatively could be said to be mostVictorian – in being deeply critical of the so-called Victorian attitudes oftheir age. Witness Arnold in opposition to philistinism, or Dickens againstreligious hypocrisy, or Ruskin and Carlyle on mechanical unfeelingness.But ‘Victorian’ is not really or mainly a Victorian word. When it doesbecome current, it is mainly as a result of a reaction on the part of thegeneration that comes afterwards, in particular Lytton Strachey of coursein Eminent Victorians – and then the usage is characteristically derogatory.‘Typically Victorian’ has a history of pejorative implications, in a waythat ‘Augustan’ or ‘Romantic’ largely have not. Thus, the best reason forstaying loyal to the term is to take on that history of derogatory reception,rather than abandon or evade it, and to give it in public memory a morejust characterization.
2. The sense of a period. I have mentioned identifiably shared concerns –to do with religion, to do with a placeable home in the world, to do withthe rise of the novel and its effect on poetry, to do with the increasedemphasis on human relationships and the human problems of what mightbe called an ordinary life on earth. In terms of further delineation, Ibelieve that the historians’ traditional tripartite division of the reign ofVictoria makes useful sense, though the interaction of at least four chro-nologies involved in the writing of literature (namely, social and publichistory, personal biography, the history of the language, and the historyof the development of literary forms) makes any one case liable to com-plexity. That said, (1) I try to demonstrate at some length in my book theusefulness of thinking of the 1830s and 1840s as the period of maximumdisorientation, following the premature death of the second generationof Romantics and the fresh impact of increased urbanization. (2) I giveevidence to show a mid-century consolidation and a semi-secular shiftthat involves an increase in general humanitarianism. (3) I am content toend my story at 1880 with the death of George Eliot, because what happensthereafter is the beginning of an aesthetic reaction to realism, in theattempt to turn art itself into an autonomous object of faith. It is, ofcourse, this latter period after 1880 that has dominated Victorian studiesover the last few years and here – as in my defence of realism as sitedprecisely between art and life – I am content to try to redress the balancein favour of an earlier Victorian high seriousness too often dismissedas naïve or cumbersome. Most importantly of all, however, I try to showhow the years from 1830 to 1880 are a major part of the story of secu-larization, a continuous serious conversation, in which Victorian realismconstitutes a holding-ground for a whole inter-related series of concerns andproblems held together agnostically in solution. And by Victorian realismhere I do not mean just the realist novel. The longest chapter in my bookis the chapter on Victorian poetry and it is placed deliberately at the veryend of the book, just before the conclusion, because it attempts to re-play
from the different perspective of poetry the concerns of the ten chaptersthat precede it. By its very closeness to the language, by the absence ofa direct all-seeing narrator such as is often offered in the novel, the alterna-tive realism of Victorian poetry exists in its not so much describing,as symptomatically enacting the struggle and the bewilderment of the storyI have to tell. For those who baulk at the insistent term ‘seriousness’(though many Victorian writers themselves preferred the German term‘earnestness’), I have much to say about the comic grotesque and aboutfantasy as alternative languages nonetheless sited in a similar arena ofconcern. Nor is that to say that the emphasis on the ‘problematic’ excludes,ignores, or undervalues the importance of other experiences – of peace-ableness, or achieved joy, or of more neutral ongoing forms of calm or time-out: quite the opposite.
3. Method. Most of what I try to do begins by seeking imaginative identifi-cation with Victorian writings, reliving their ways of thinking and feeling.I make no apologies for privileging such involvement and preferring itsrisks: literary history should try to give access, even (or especially) whenit is sometimes access to a sense of the somehow finally inaccessible (andindeed most often so in the working of the poetry). Imagination, guidedby a sense of historical context, does not necessarily mean appropriationor colonization: it is wrong always to assume so, devaluing its cognitivevalue. The attempt to imagine as well as understand involves the literaryeffort not only to think thoughts ab extra but to get a feel of what it is liketo have those thoughts inside a particular life and a particular situation ata particular time – and that ‘feel’ is itself part of the thought and the realityof the experience. Thus, I believe literary history is not an end in itselfbut a means to an end – and the immediate end is to help to provide accessto the writings of that time, not only in avoiding anachronisms but ingiving what should shake down into a deep pre-conceptual feel for theworks, even in their opacities and struggles. It is often claimed that ‘we’have to read Victorian works differently from Victorian readers themselves,but I have never seen this proved nor know how it could be, and I suspectit to be another of those scholarly ‘hands-off ’ tactics that denies thecapacity for trans-historical imagination by conflating it into ‘appropria-tion of what is other’. It is a poor fashion that is determined to stayoutside the area of study, cool, critical and detached – as though thatwere synonymous with ‘objectivity’ – when the literature itself is so oftenpassionately, strugglingly, within the felt experience of thinking, even onthe very verge of the otherwise unthinkable.
4. Purpose. If literary history is indeed a means to an end, then finally themost important end in respect of ‘the Victorians’ is this: to find andmeditate upon those past voices that confront problems of how to live inan ordinary, uncertain, agnostic world that may or may not be a godlessone. That is the use of Victorian literary history for the realism of real life:to help us use the books in our serious imaginative thinking, with regard
to both inherited existential problems and preserved human possibilities.I admit that that is a Victorian sort of project for literature, a Victoriansort of belief, and I welcome debate about its validity – providing theposition to be debated is not all too automatically dismissed as thereforeuntenably old-fashioned. But that really means that one of the least inter-esting or important things one could ask about ‘the Victorians’ is whetherthe name is justified.
Notes1 F. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983), pp. 57–123.2 J. Ruskin, ‘Modern Painters’, vol 1, part 2, section 3, chapter 3, paragraph 3, in SelectedWritings, ed. P. Davis (London: Everyman, Dent, 1995), p. 53.3 J. Coulson, Religion and Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), especially pp. 33–83,pp. 96–103.4 J. H. Newman, The Idea of a University (1852; rev 1859, 1873) ed. I Ker (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1976): see especially the section University Subjects, II ‘Literature’.5 J. S. Mill, ‘On Liberty’ (1859). In Collected Works, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto and London:University of Toronto), vol. 18. See Liberty: Contemporary Responses to John Stuart Mill, ed.A. Pyle (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994).6 I. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 7.7 S. Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903), ed. J. Cochrane (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin,1970); L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918), ed. J. Sutherland (Oxford: World’s Classics, 2003).8 W. H. Mallock, Is Life Worth Living? (London, 1879).9 D. Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992), p. 84.10 C. Rossetti, Complete Poems, ed. R. W. Crump (London: Penguin, 2001).11 F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality (London, 1903).12 J. S. Mill, ‘On Coleridge’ (1840). In Collected Works, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto and London:University of Toronto), vol. 10, p. 122.13 C. Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50), ed. N. Burgis (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1985),chapter 48.14 J. H. Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), ed. N. Lash (Notre Dame,Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1979), pp. 272–3.15 J. H. Newman, ‘Implicit and Explicit Reason’, University Sermons 1826–43, eds. D. M. Mackinnonand J. D. Holmes (London: SPCK, 1970), p. 267.16 Spectator, 7 December 1895, p. 815.17 See Coulson, pp. 63–4.18 T. Carlyle, ‘On History’ (1830). In Selected Writings, ed. A. Shelston (Harmondworth,Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), p. 55.19 Carlyle, ‘On History’, Selected Writings, p. 54.20 R. W. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. J. Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983),p. 246.21 G. M. Young Portrait of an Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), especially pp. 17–19.
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Philip Davis is a Professor in the School of English, University of Liverpool. Apart from TheVictorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), he has published Memory and Writing, TheExperience of Reading, Real Voices: On Reading, In Mind of Johnson, Sudden Shakespeare andMalamud’s People. He is currently writing a biography of Bernard Malamud.
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