Twentieth-Century Re-Workings of the Victorian Novel
Grace Moore*University of Melbourne
AbstractThis essay offers an overview of recent critical studies of the neo-Victorian novelalongside a discussion of revisions of Victorian writing from the 1880s to thepresent day. The piece seeks to examine some of the recent critical debatessurrounding what Robin Gilmour has termed ‘using’ the nineteenth century. Itwill map the trajectory of these revisions from the late nineteenth century to thepresent day to consider how and why Victorian novels and cultural icons continueto be re-worked, and what makes the Victorians such an attractive source forwriters and artists.
[T]he Victorian past is not another country here: it exists in dynamic relationto the present, which it both interprets and is interpreted by.
– Robin Gilmour
In his postmodern mish-mash of nineteenth- and twenty-first-centurytechnologies, The Diamond Age (1995), one of Neal Stephenson’s charactersobserves, ‘I guess there’s a little Victorian in all of us’ (381). It is this sensethat we carry our Victorian heritage within us that might account for ourongoing critical fascination with what Cora Kaplan has recently labeled‘Victoriana’. Kaplan astutely ascribes our need to revisit and reinvent theVictorian as ‘more than nostalgia’ and argues that it is a symptom of achanging engagement with history that leaves us, as she puts it, ‘permanentlyrestless and unsettled’ (3). The revisionist process has occurred for reasonsranging from the misprision of modernist writers, to a more recent affectionfor so-called ‘Victorian values’, along with a postcolonial backlash againsta continuing valorization of the English literary canon. This essay willexamine some of the recent critical debates surrounding what RobinGilmour has termed ‘using’ the nineteenth century. It will map the trajectoryof these revisions from the late nineteenth century to the present day toconsider how and why Victorian novels and cultural icons continue to bereworked, and what makes the Victorians such an attractive source forwriters and artists.
The term ‘Victorian’ is a slippery one and, as Michael Mason notes,the characteristics of Victorianism are regularly redefined according to
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contemporary needs. Mason asks whether what he calls ‘the idea of theVictorian’ is ‘good history’, citing the stigma of moral prudery that has,for some, surrounded the label since the beginning of the twentiethcentury (18). Mason’s question is an astute one, given the length ofVictoria’s reign and the extraordinary changes that took place in Britainbetween 1837 and 1901. As John Plunkett points out, those responsiblefor the circulation of the Queen’s public image were keen to associateVictoria with the modernity of the industrial age and the bourgeoisfamily unit, making the ‘Victorian era’ quite separate from the nineteenthcentury. In subsequent years, though, as we move ever further away fromthe nineteenth century, the term ‘Victorian’ has, as Simon Joyce suggests,been re-shaped as an insult, paradoxically connoting strict morality orhypocrisy depending upon one’s political or cultural positioning. As aconsequence the term ‘Victorian’ is both a useful shorthand and a barrierto understanding the complexities of a series of shifting cultural identitiesacross a period of more than sixty years.
Over the past two decades there has been growing scholarly interest inwhat Dana Shiller has termed the ‘neo-Victorian novel’, and a number ofimportant studies of contemporary revisions have appeared, includingJohn Kucich and Dianne Sadoff ’s edited collection, Victorian Afterlife(2000), John Thieme’s Postcolonial Con-Texts (2001), Jay Clayton’s brilliant,interdisciplinary analysis, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace (2003), and CoraKaplan’s series of case studies, ranging from Jane Eyre to Campion’s ThePiano, Victoriana (2007). These works constitute important studies ofrevisionism, with particular attention to the spate of pastiches, parodies,and rewrites of Victorian novels that have emerged in the last twenty yearsor so. However, these studies are primarily concerned with re-workingsfrom Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) to the present day. To date, though,there has been no sustained study of the origins of writing back to theVictorians, the ways in which each generation from the 1880s onwardshas, in its differing way, ‘argued with the past’, and the ways in whichwilful mis-readings of the past accumulate to form accepted ‘truths’ aboutwhat has come before. As the Tennyson scholar Gerhard Joseph has registered,
we have surely moved from seeing the Victorians as they saw themselves tosomething rather different – to a sense of how the Victorian object is difficultto ‘see’ except as an anticipation of our contemporary interpretive habits.(Anger 29)
At this historical juncture, the Victorians remain attractively mysterious,yet tantalizingly familiar. When the literary journalist Matthew Sweetpublished his controversial Inventing the Victorians (2000), the book wasattacked for its attempts to render the Victorians ‘just like us’ as KathrynHughes suggested in a review in the New Statesman. Sweet’s work wascondemned for cutting the nineteenth century down to size and reducingthe culture to a single master narrative with which readers could identify.
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The responses to Sweet’s self-proclaimed attempt to ‘rescue’ the Victorianshave opened up a fascinating debate on modern-day relations with thenineteenth century and the continuing need to detect traces of the presentin the past. Part of this need to render the Victorians familiar seems to bea coping mechanism for doubts and anxieties about the future, particularlyin the context of technological and scientific developments. As the firstadvanced industrial nation, Victorian Britain offers a compelling templateor scapegoat for present-day anxieties and tensions, contemporary debatesabout morality, sexuality or race relations are frequently off-loaded ontothe Victorians, as Kate Mitchell, following Raphael Samuel and TristramHunt, has recently argued. While Sweet was condemned by a number ofacademic critics (see, for instance, the VICTORIA-L archives) for hisapparent need to identify with the Victorians or to make them recognizable,his work and the debate surrounding it opened up a number of keyquestions about our relationship to our forebears. The discussions emergingfrom Sweet’s book also highlight the dynamism of (perceptions of) Victorianidentity, and a critical discomfort with the idea of a static past. Thepostmodern critic Linda Hutcheon theorizes this process, arguing that‘Postmodern fiction suggests that to re-write or to re-present the past infiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, toprevent it from being conclusive and teleological’ (110). This ‘opening up’has been vital for the recovery and reclamation of marginalized voices andthe revisionist process often marks the first stage for writers attempting tomove away from subordination to the English canon by revising or distorting‘classic’ texts. As publications like Patsy Stoneman’s Brontë Transformationsand the recent special edition of the Victorians Institute Journal on Victorianghosts demonstrate, the process of re-imagining the Victorians hasbecome an area of major academic interest.
Of course, while novels that re-work, revise, or pastiche the Victorianseem to appear on a regular basis, the process of scrutiny and reconstructionis hardly a new phenomenon. In the 1880s and 1890s figures like EdmundGosse, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw began to hit out at ‘high’Victorianism. In Wilde’s case, he demonized the mid-Victorians in abid to construct himself as a flamboyant original, at odds with the massproduction and mediocrity that he aligned with the industrial middleclasses and the mid-Victorian years. The fin de siècle saw widespreadresistance to what were labeled ‘high’ Victorian moral codes, with Decadence,Dandyism, and the ‘New Women’ all, in differing ways, seeking to floutconvention and to re-define what it meant to be a Victorian; constructinga discourse of ‘high’ Victorian morality in order to situate their variousoppositions to it.
Rebels in every era struggle against the status quo, and it is not unusualfor cultures to draw upon a collective national past or heritage at times ofboth cultural insecurity and national pride. Victorian figures like G. A.Henty and Sir Henry Newbolt looked back to the reign of Elizabeth I as
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a way of aligning Britain’s imperial exploits in the latter part of thenineteenth century with the maritime prowess of figures such as Sir FrancisDrake. Mid-Victorians, including Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Disraeli,looked longingly back to the feudal period in works like Past and Present(1843) and Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), which attempt to retreat fromthe pressures of industrial capitalism. Other examples of this nostalgia forthe past include the medievalism of Algernon Swinburne and WilliamMorris. What makes the reinventions of the Victorians from the 1880sonwards different from nineteenth-century engagements with the Renaissanceor the Middle Ages, I would suggest, is that there is a much more obviouscontinuum of re-shaping, spanning over a hundred years. The revisionismitself has taken and continues to take a wide range of different forms, fromthe struggles of the late Victorians, through to the return to the past ofengagements from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Moreover, owingto the expanse of Victorian cultural imperialism and its legacy in the eraof decolonization, revisionism has, in recent years, become a much moreglobal phenomenon, with writers from Australia (for instance the expatriatePeter Carey, in Oscar and Lucinda [1988], Jack Maggs [1997] and The TrueHistory of the Kelly Gang [2000], Margaret Scott, in Family Album [2000],and Gail Jones, whose Sixty Lights [2004] ranges from London to Australiato Bombay) Canada (Jane Urquhart in Changing Heaven [1990]), the Caribbean(Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights [1998], V. S. Naipaul’s Guerillas[1975]), India (Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace [2000]), and North America(Susanne Alleyn in A Far Better Rest [2000], Bruce Bueno de Mesquita,The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge [2001], John Irving The Cider House Rules[1985]), all engaged in updating or rewriting the ‘classic’ Victorian novel.This is not to undermine the importance of nostalgia, for while postcolonialnovelists frequently reveal an animosity towards the nineteenth century,writers like Michel Faber (The Crimson Petal and the White [2002], TheApple [2006]) and Charles Palliser (The Quincunx [1989]) combine meticulousresearch with postmodern playfulness and an apparent affection for theVictorians. Raphael Samuel has described these gentle nods to the past as‘resurrectionism’ or part of a ‘retrieval project’ (140), while critics includingJonathan Raban and Suzanne Keen have suggested that the Victorian‘heritage’ has become part of a ‘usable past’ (Keen 5) often put to workby conservatives as a means of occluding historical ‘facts’.
In the nineteenth century’s immediate aftermath, Victorian achievementsand modernity weighed heavily upon the minds of a number of keymodernist writers and artists. Seeking to assert their own modernity andfundamental difference from the age that had just passed, figures likeVirginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Lytton Strachey became consciouslyinvolved in an almost Oedipal drive to ‘kill’ the historical ‘parent’ periodwhich had given birth to them, by transforming a pioneering, inventive,and resourceful era into one of darkness, repression, and sterility. As shedemonstrates in a number of essays and novels (including Orlando [1928],
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Flush [1933], Freshwater [1935] her play about her aunt, the renownedphotographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and The Years [1937]), Woolf wasself-consciously (and often self-mockingly) involved in cutting her immediateancestors down to size and downplaying their daunting creative and artisticlegacies. Part of this process stemmed from her difficult relationship withher astoundingly productive father, Leslie Stephen, but more generally,Woolf was both absorbed and repelled by the industrious lives of herliterary predecessors and frustrated with, but drawn to, the apparentcertainties of nineteenth-century realism.
Lytton Strachey, Woolf ’s friend and rival, famously observed at thebeginning of his magnum opus, Eminent Victorians:
The history of the Victorian age will never be written: we know too muchabout it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, whichsimplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfectionunattainable by the highest art. (9)
Far from being impossible to write, the history of the Victorian age hasbeen and continues to be almost obsessively re-written, just as Stracheyre-shaped it in a bid to forge a post-Victorian cultural identity. This is notto suggest a universal rejection of the Victorian at the beginning of thetwentieth century. Indeed, writers including John Galsworthy, author ofThe Forsyte Saga (1906–1921) felt a pang of nostalgia for their Victorianheritage. Moreover, as Miles Taylore reminds us, a large number of lateVictorian writers, including Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, WilliamMorris, and Walter Pater were ‘co-opted into the modernist canon’ (4).Moreover, the agenda of the revisionists was itself in a constant state ofchange over time, with the 1940s and 50s marking an important departurefrom the deliberate misrepresentations of Bloomsbury. Some mid-twentieth-century writers like George Orwell discharged anger andfrustration at the world of social and racial inequality for which he heldhis forebears responsible, whilst dealing with the obliteration of Victorianacaused by two World Wars. Orwell’s complex attitude towards the Victoriansis played out in the yearning for the uncomplicated past in Coming up forAir (1939), which offers a direct contrast to his withering satire ofVictorian imperial values and their legacy in essays like ‘England, YourEngland’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ or his extended critique of CharlesDickens’s moralism.
While Orwell struggled to pin down his responses to his predecessors,for many novelists, historians and literary critics, the middle years of thetwentieth century heralded a time to take stock of and re-evaluate Victo-rianism. The 1951 centenary of the opening of the Great Exhibition atthe Crystal Palace offered one such opportunity, with the Festival ofBritain commemorating the first display of wares from around the worldand celebrating Victorian ingenuity and progress. The fifties became atime to rehabilitate the Victorians, with literary scholars like Richard D.
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Altick and Joseph Baker reading them against the grain of Bloomsbury.Perhaps seeking to fill the void left behind by the carpet-bombing ofBritish cities and the wholesale destruction of historical buildings andartefacts, the 1950s saw a revival of interest in the previous century and amore reverential attitude towards the Victorians, as noted by John Gardiner(Taylor and Wolff 176). The architectural historian Niklaus Pevsner offersan excellent example of this rehabilitation process, moving as he did fromdisdain for Victorian design in the early twentieth century to becomingone of the founding members of the Victorian Society by 1958. The poet,broadcaster and heritage campaigner John Betjeman presents anotherinstance of the escape from Strachey’s demonization of all things Victorian,beginning his career with a condemnation of Victorian aesthetics in theearly 1930s (see, for instance, Ghastly Good Taste [1933]), before going onto achieve a wholesale appreciation by the 1950s, acting as a foundingmember of the Victorian Society in 1958.
Victorian ‘taste’ had been widely ridiculed in the first decades of thetwentieth century, following Oscar Wilde’s violent reaction against theclutter of the bourgeois drawing room and Strachey’s lampooning ofalmost every element of Victorian style. However, landmark publicationsincluding Clark’s Gothic Revival (1928) began to offer ways to understandand appreciate the Victorian aesthetic, which until this juncture had beenregarded as spectacularly overdone. As Anthony Burton has commented,
Historians of the decorative arts in the early twentieth century found themselvesunable to like Victorian art. They could not accept that a Victorian whatnotwas merely unfashionable; they felt that it was an immoral monstrosity. (Taylorand Wolff 121)
Novelists including the Brontë revisionist, Elizabeth Coles Taylor (A Gameof Hide and Seek [1951]), the historical novelist, Sylvia Townsend Warner(The Flint Anchor [1954]) and Mary Stewart, author of The Ivy Tree (1961)all showed a renewed interest in the Victorian at this juncture.
In more recent years Victorian icons, novels and even novelists havebeen adapted, re-evaluated, and reinterpreted by feminist, postmodernand postcolonial novelists among others. In the late 1960s, interest in theVictorian and neo-Victorian really began to revive, largely as a consequenceof advances in the feminist movement and also in response to decolonization.Revisions to emerge ranged from the loving, nostalgic pastiches of JohnFowles – most famously The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) – to moreangry politically-charged re-workings like Jean Rhys’s feminist postcolonialre-evaluation of Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The 1970s saw thepublication of V. S. Naipaul’s transposition of the Jane Eyre story toCaribbean, following Jean Rhys, while J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur(1973) examined the Indian ‘mutiny’ from a postcolonial perspective,cleverly re-imagining the Crystal Palace as a type of dangerous panopticonand a symbol of British mismanagement. Jay Clayton, in Charles Dickens
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in Cyberspace, cleverly picks up on the palace’s iconography to consider italongside the spectacularly uniconic Millennium dome as part of what hecalls ‘hacking’ the nineteenth century. For Clayton, anachronism, such asthat encountered in Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990),offers the most interesting possibilities for the neo-Victorian novelist asthe past and the present can be mangled in order to inform one another(Clayton in Kucich and Sadoff 195, see also Charles Dickens in Cyberspace).
John Thieme has suggested that there can be no over-arching thesisto explain the diverse range of texts that attempt to ‘write back’ to thenineteenth-century novel, arguing that geographical and cultural disparitiesbetween the works and the conditions which produced them would bereductive. Thieme is right to suggest that a revision of Wuthering Heightslike Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights (1998) can have little in commonwith a Canadian re-writing of the same novel like Jane Urquhart’s ChangingHeaven (1993). However, the fact that these re-workings are appearingacross cultures deserves greater theoretical attention and analysis. In herexcellent work, Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts (1999) Kathleen J.Renk has asserted that a large number of revisionist versions of ‘classicnovels’ are the result of attempts to ‘bury’ the ghost of Victorian imperialism.She also emphasizes how revisionists from Jean Rhys onwards bring toprominence figures who were marginalized in the original text as a resultof social and economic prejudice. While Renk’s study is impressive in itsscope and argument, it is somewhat manichean in its assigning of culpability.The revisionist process is undoubtedly an important one, but the historicalcontexts of those engaged in re-writing must be interrogated just asclosely as those of the original authors. There is something sinisterly akinto imperialism entangled in revisionism, in that the Victorians themselvesare now being constructed as ‘historical others’. The re-writing of thenineteenth-century novel involves an apportioning of blame, and implicitin any attack on prejudices that are identified with a specific historicalera is the notion that the new critique is somehow able to transcend itsown context. By labelling racial, economic, gender, or any other form ofdiscrimination ‘Victorian’ we deny its continued existence in our ownsociety, and it is therefore essential to examine our own ideological positionwhen we engage in reinventing or reconfiguring the Victorians.
For some writers, for instance the Tasmania-based novelist MargaretScott, the Victorians are figures to be remembered fondly, and Scott’scharacters make efforts to understand and reconstruct a single, ‘authentic’past. As A. S. Byatt’s Professor Blackadder suggests at the end of Possession(1990), the process of delving into history is all too often one of exploringmyths of origins, whether of individual ancestors, or a broader sense ofnational identity. This latter process is taken to an extreme by theAustralian writer Peter Carey, for whom Victorianism is figured as adangerous prison, threatening to trap writers from de-colonized nationsinto being intimidated by the period’s colossal monuments, enormous
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novels and overwhelmingly energetic writers. Carey has moved through aprocess of nostalgia and awe in Oscar and Lucinda (1988) – a novel whichspeaks back to The Siege of Krishnapur – to outright hostility in Jack Maggs(1997), where he presents the reader with a malevolent portrait of CharlesDickens as a plagiarist and appropriator of marginal voices. For Carey,though, the reinvention process is ultimately a productive one. Havingseized back the convict Magwitch’s voice by writing Great Expectations anew,he then moves away from pastiches of the British nineteenth-centurynovel to examine the Australian settler narrative in his subsequent novel,True History of the Kelly Gang (2000).
While Carey has waged an ongoing battle with the nineteenth-centurynovel and Dickens in particular, writers like David Lodge (Author, Author),Colm Toibin (The Master [2004]) and A. N. Wilson (A Jealous Ghost[2005]) have all turned to Henry James for inspiration. Lodge and Toibinconcern themselves with James’s biography and, in Toibin’s case, hissexuality, Wilson, however, presents an entertaining reworking of TheTurn of the Screw with a would-be academic at its centre. As Suzanne Keenhas demonstrated in her splendid study, Romances of the Archive (2001),positioning an academic within the action of a neo-Victorian novel is notuncommon. Indeed, as novelists become increasingly conscious of theircritical audiences, the over-worked literary scholar like Byatt’s RolandMichell or Lodge’s Robyn Penrose (Nice Work [1986]) has become animportant textual representative for the neo-Victorian novel’s self-consciouspostmodernism.
The reason behind our fetishization of the Victorian past is, accordingto Jennifer Green-Lewis, that ‘we can see the Victorians’ (Kucich andSadoff 31, my italics). We identify with the Victorians as ‘modern’, butcan also ridicule them as out-moded. Robin Gilmour offered a useful andsuccinct summary of the ongoing attractions of the Victorian arguing that;
The period is an inviting one for parody and experimentation just becauseit is so seeming-solid and so unselfconscious in the expression of its officialattitudes; and because these attitudes are held so often in an unreconstructedway and so garrulously and directly expressed in its fiction. (Jenkins and John 191)
Gilmour’s essay goes on to argue that the neo-Victorian novel quietlydraws attention to the unsatisfactory nature of both contemporary andVictorian writing, seeking to fill in the silences in the nineteenth-centurynovel, while at the same time offering a ‘density and a satisfying solidity’that is seldom delivered by the shorter prose of the late twentieth andearly twenty-first centuries. A text like Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George(2005), for instance, supplements our knowledge of an author like ConanDoyle, while at the same time allowing us to re-enter the world ofSherlock Holmes. For Gilmour, many neo-Victorian works are concernedwith the secret lives of the Victorians, although he acknowledges in ahelpful list of six categories that other forms of revision include parodies,
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which attempt to cut the past down to size and subversions of Victorianideologies and fictional forms.
There are now so many parodies, pastiches, revisions, and reconfigurationsof the Victorian novel that it is impossible to give a complete overview.From the voluptuous Queen Victoria clone of Paul di Filippo’s SteampunkTrilogy (1995) to the criminal underworld of Sarah Waters’s three historicalnovels (Tipping the Velvet [1998], Affinity [1999], and Fingersmith [2002]),the Victorian period has been mined deeply for its narrative possibilities.Those who would have found themselves marginalized and without a voicein nineteenth-century Britain have been particularly drawn to the Victorians,often seeking the historical origins of their oppression and sometimestrying to attribute blame and responsibility. There remains a great deal ofwork to be done, particularly on the history of revisionism and the middleof the last century and on the interplay of re-workings of the Victoriannovel with broader public responses to Victorian art, architecture andmusic. Whether they offer ventriloquism, parody, or condemnation, thereading public continues to devour reinventions of the Victorian and asGilmour has suggested, ‘Evoking the Victorians and their world has notbeen an antiquarian activity but a means of getting a fresh perspective onthe present’ (200).
Short Biography
Grace Moore teaches at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She isthe author of Dickens and Empire (Ashgate, 2004), which was short-listedfor the New South Wales Premier’s Biennial Award for Literary Scholarship(2006), and the co-editor of Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation(Ashgate, 2004). She is at present editing a collection on nineteenth-centurypiracy (contracted to Ashgate) and writing a monograph on reinventingVictorianism.
Note
* Correspondence address: Literary Studies – University of Melbourne, Parkville, Melbourne,Victoria 3198, Australia. E-mail: [email protected].
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